Doom: The Plutonia Experiment
by Mike MacDee
Summary: Compiled here are three chilling journals: three teams of doomed humans who bore witness to the fall of the human race. The first arrives on Phobos to find a demonic invasion force awaiting them. The second tries desperately to escape Deimos and warn earth of the coming apocalypse. The third ventures into Hell, itself, to stop an army of the damned from using a stolen superweapon.
1. 1: Knee Deep in the Dead

****Mike MacDee****

 ** **KNEE DEEP IN THE DEAD****

 ** **A horror novella based on id software's DOOM****

 ** **3**** ** **rd**** ** **Edition****

 ** **Special thanks to Steven Johnson, for inspiring me to keep improving.****

 ** **After Action Report for Operation: Phobia****

Sgt. Tom H. Matthews, UAC-Mars1 Military Police

Filed Nov. 4th, 2599

 ** **Date of Execution:****

Oct. 29th, 2599

 ** **Sponsors:****

Union Aerospace Corporation

United States Marine Corps

United States Air Force

 ** **Classification:****

For Official Use Only

 ** **Scenario:****

Other (threat unknown)

 ** **Location:****

UAC-Phobos Research Installation

 ** **Participants:****

UAC-Mars1 Military Police

UAC-Mars1 Science Team

 ** **Number of Participants:****

Space Marines 18

Science Officers 2

 ** **Operation Overview****

Radio contact lost with UAC-Phobos Research Installation on Oct. 18th, following reports of unspecified equipment failure believed extremely hazardous. Incident occurred shortly before unexplained Deimos phenomenon. Phobos-bound security reinforcements failed to establish contact with Mars Base upon arrival, and have not returned since deployed on Oct. 19th.

Purpose of operation:

1- Reestablish radio contact between UAC-Mars1 and UAC-Phobos.

2- Avert or contain possible radioactive or biohazardous outbreak in UAC-Phobos and assist in evacuation of UAC employees if necessary.

3- Determine what happened to Deimos and missing security reinforcements.

4- Provide a swift resolution to stabilize dwindling morale of UAC-Mars1 staff.

Team of local employees assembled for military sweep of Phobos installation. All participants equipped with UAC all-purpose envirosuits, and instructed to keep helmets secured for remainder of mission, or until team's science officers ascertained no dangerous environmental conditions existed inside UAC-Phobos. All military participants fully armed with standard security tasers to prevent or contain possible mass panic on Phobos, six additionally outfitted with shotguns and stun rounds. Phobia Team's shuttle launched at 07:00 after final equipment check.

Aerial scan of UAC-Phobos at 08:00 revealed massive collateral damage at north side of the facility: two structures caved and shattered, later determined the result of strategically placed C4 charges from Phobos construction crew's stockpile; Phobos Labs and computer station utterly destroyed. Command Control unresponsive to hailing frequency.

At 09:00 Phobia Team searched installation's interior for survivors, but every block proved completely deserted. Undamaged half of facility contained evidence of firefights, and other things of disturbing nature difficult to describe (see photographs). All mainframes permanently offline, data irretrievable. All comm. systems sabotaged and inoperable. Entire facility appeared to have been through a small war. No environmental hazards detected, but helmets remained secured due to major oxygen leaks in several sectors.

Nuclear plant and toxin refinery, though similarly abandoned and scarred with gunfire, otherwise appeared in perfect working order with all automated systems functioning properly. S.O.'s detected no radioactive leakage, but still considered it possible risk in light of previous series of unexplained phenomena, and manually shut down nuclear reactor to prevent further incidents.

Personal Digital Assistant later discovered in air traffic control tower, hand-written note secured to its backside with marine dog tags. Message transcribed on account of illegible handwriting. Reads as follows:

 _ _This is my last attempt to get my message off this God-forsaken rock. All I can do now is hope that someone finds this and delivers it to Mars Base. It's the only explanation for what happened here. I have a rough journey to make, and the more I think about where it leads the harder my courage tries to scramble away. I don't have a choice now. The mission log will explain everything.__

 _ _Pray for me.__

PDA also contains several documents and other media stolen from Phobos Labs database, with attachments to each scattered throughout abovementioned mission log, likely intended as supporting evidence. Transcript of log follows operation overview. Mars Base psychologists not sure what to make of it: document reads like schizophrenic delusions, describing scenes depicted in Phobia Team's photographs with unsettling accuracy. Chief administrators confirm dog tags and PDA belong to U.S. Marine recently shipped to Mars Base from UAC-Earth HQ. Body of marine in question remains unaccounted for.

Phobia Team returned to Mars Base at 07:00 on Nov. 3rd with photographs of Phobos installation and list of known dead; all employees MIA presumed deceased. Second team will assemble at later date to recover any and all salvageable UAC property from ruins.

###

 ** **Transcript of Mission Log****

1

I hate space travel. I've been sitting in a titanium ice chest for the last two hours with no TV and no radio, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with seven of my shift buddies, marinating in a thick body odor that burns my eyes. If I don't keep myself distracted I'll pass out, either from the smell or my starving gut. So I'm finally using my PDA as a personal log. Had it since I arrived two months ago and never touched it except to check for memos from Captain Berenger or updates from Max about Poker Night. Always wanted to take a stab at journalism.

Feel like a sardine in here. On the outside the ship looks huge. Standard transport shuttle, about fifty-by-thirty feet of bulky titanium hull, six stiff legs and six big lights fore and aft. When docked, it looks like a clunky wind-up tick the size of a small house. But inside it's as cramped as an armored personnel carrier, only so cold your fingertips go numb. Passengers sit with their backs to the walls in seats that I'd bet good money are made of concrete. They strapped me in so tight I can hardly turn my head, and scratching my ass is out of the question. Any other marine would sit back and call it cozy. Color me disillusioned.

Space marine, as hip as it sounds, is roughly similar to calling someone a rent-a-cop. On Earth we belong to the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, even the National Guard; on Mars we're all lumped together as space marines, which places us just above the gum Captain Berenger scrapes off his boot in the evening. Mars Patrol officers tend to be hot shot kids who haven't even finished their initial tours; the few that have any real combat experience are the kinds of soldiers that get swept under the rug before they stain the military's reputation.

Next to Berenger, I'm the most experienced marine on this flight. Rowlins served in the war, but he never talks about it, and if anybody asks he just goes into a silent string of prayers, stroking the cross dangling around his neck. Right now he's sitting upright with his eyes closed, either sleeping or meditating, I can't tell which. Mad Max has tenure, too, but as a Chair Force helicopter pilot. I hope so, anyway: she's flying this hunk of shit tonight.

The others are talking among themselves or nodding off - despite Max's heavy metal playlist blasting out of the shuttle speakers - and every one of them is from my shift. Kinney's got his jibber-jabber going on, like always. He's been talking with McGee about the fucking Lakers game since we suited up for this trip. McGee's a lot like Kinney except that he's white, talks with a drawl, and occasionally knows when to keep his mouth shut. Army boys lounging on the reserves, probably spent more time peeling potatoes than toughening up in boot camp. They're next to me and Rowlins.

Petro, Butch, and Trague sit across from us in a beefy, smelly line, all three of them leaning back with their eyes half-shut like sunbathers on the beach, discussing tomorrow night's poker game in two- to three-word sentences spoken at thirty second intervals. Only saw about three months of action before they got discharged for abusing POWs — nothing violent, but embarrassing enough that their superiors had them transferred before the press could reach them. After a year or so they get to go back, once the heat has died down. Lucky them.

Berenger is on their side, dwarfing them all with his ego alone. There's a lot of rumors why he's here: beating too many new recruits, couldn't cut it as a drill instructor, hoping to be on the front lines of earth's first inter-galactic war. Any or all of them could be true.

Bunch of degenerates on this ship as a whole, made worse during their stay on this planet because there's nothing for soldiers to do up here except arrest wise-ass hackers, play cards, or go six-wheeling in a stolen Mars rover. Apart from Berenger, they're all pretty good guys. Gave me a real warm welcome my first day. Excited as hell to be in space, the whole lot of them. They're here because they wanted to be, to live the sci-fi geek's biggest dream and reap the best pay and benefits they'll ever get. Nobody sent them to the Red Planet to disappear forever.

excerpt from audio log

BERENGER: Barrett, stay tuned to Phobos frequency. If they send any more transmissions, I wanna hear 'em.

MAX: Yes, Sir. FYI, we'll be passing into radio blackout with UAC Mars once Phobos reaches the other side o' the planet.

BERENGER: Roger that. And turn off that goddamned noise!

[Heavy metal music abruptly stops.]

KINNEY: 'Least she ain't playin' country no more.

MCGEE: She only plays that when she's homesick.

MAX: __HAWW__ -Haww-haw.

KINNEY: Hey moonshiner, you ever get homesick again, you can always blow on __my__ jug.

[Kinney and McGee laugh.]

MAX: Kinney's breakin' up. Sarge, check his headset, wouldja?

[Loud thud of Kinney's head being bucked against the side of the shuttle.]

KINNEY: OW! Mother _ _fucker-__!

MAX: Loud n' clear now. Thanks, Sarge.

Everyone calls me Sarge. It's the rank my beloved country relieved me of prior to shitting me down the galaxy's toilet.

We should already be in the air, but Max is fixing another problem on the shuttle. Nothing works on this planet. They constantly renovate everything to make Mars Base more efficient, but every time they "fix" one thing they screw up another. I guess the admins have their heads so far up their asses they keep forgetting everybody's sharing resources here. They'll take something offline for repair and neglect to send a memo, so everyone gets to find out the hard way when their phones, computer network, or toilets aren't working. Wall and ceiling panels occasionally collapse on passers-by, power surges screw with the lights and fry important machinery, and too many halls and rooms are cluttered with misplaced barrels of shit from the nuclear plant that I don't want to think about.

It must be the same for Phobos, because that's why we're sitting here in the first place. "Contact with UAC-Deimos Installation lost. Phobos S.S.O. requires additional military support ASAP until situation resolved." Support my ass. It'll be a miracle if this heap leaves the ground.

To be honest, I hope it never does. They mess with weird shit on those moons. Bet that's why Rowlins is more quiet than usual. Hell, Carlyle went up there two weeks ago, came back babbling and went on a shooting spree before he turned the barrel on himself. But Berenger is a six-foot-two pillar of Aryan granite, and if he says we're going to Phobos, that's where we're going. My protests already landed me in detention once.

After liftoff, it'll be a couple hours before we reach our destination - Phobos is on the other side of the planet right now, so we just float within radio distance of Mars Base and wait for the moon to come to us. I should probably get some sleep, but if the landing is as rough as before I'm liable to tumble into shellshock again. I was awake last time, so it wasn't too bad. Just sat for fifteen minutes with every muscle stiff as wood, staring straight ahead like a frightened rookie, fists clenched and asshole puckered; instantly broke into a sweat when the turbulence settled, waited for the rear door to flop open and let in the hot desert wind and cackle of machine guns. Instead, warp engines hummed to life to remind me I was traveling across the cosmos and not the Middle East, and my muscles sighed and deflated all at once. No telling what I'll do, though, if I'm suddenly jarred awake thinking I'm back in Pakistan.

Space marine. In a way, I am that virgin recruit all over again. Transferred from a sick and dying planet to a long dead one. Brushed off Earth's surface like dandruff.

Max is back in the cockpit. All systems go, she says. We're Phobos-bound in T-minus one minute.

2

We got another transmission from Phobos a half hour after launch. Reception was so bad we couldn't understand any of it, and the guy shouting on the other end seemed to be aware of the problem and really angry about it.

"-leas-fo-dsake-Ik-nee-y are, we d-ow what to d-somth-f the gatew-sus Ch-reverywh-"

The transmission died, and there wasn't a peep the rest of the trip. We've been just as quiet. Max asked Mars Base if they heard the message and got a negative, likely because the radios on Mars aren't worth a shit. They keep promising to upgrade to a better system.

We're drifting over the south end of Phobos Base, directly over the beached junior aircraft carrier they call the hangar — cargo ships rarely have to visit, and only stick around long enough for pickups and deliveries, so there's only room for one shuttle to land. I guess pilots park on whatever resembles a blinking white "H" and dump everything onto the flight deck for the lab boys to collect later (including new recruits). But all shuttles need clearance to land, so we're waiting for Command Control to pick up the phone. The facility's every function is either managed or monitored by Command Control, just like Mars Base. Nobody can so much as send an email or take a piss without the supervisors knowing about it.

"Command Control, this is Mars Shuttle Hippolyta. Reinforcements have arrived. Request permission to land. Acknowledge."

A shuttle arrives, it signals air traffic control asking Command Control for permission to land, air traffic control patches it through to Command Control, who gives air traffic control the green light, who clears the shuttle. It's asinine, but I'm told all it takes is Mad Max's hello and the radio guys respond like trained dogs — she may look like a boy, but she's got pipes deep and smooth like Lauren Bacall's that get most fellas stiff after three words.

We did a last-minute equipment check before securing our helmets: standard UAC magnetic boots to keep us from floating off the moon's surface (fun thought); Special Ops grappling cables in case of emergencies; two portable first aid kits, and one medical stimpack for each of us; a light arsenal of 9mm Beretta pistols and stockless Winchester Defenders from Mars Patrol's inventory — the only weapons distributed on the entire planet because they're not potent enough to risk a hull breach.

I'd like to know why we brought live ammo instead of stun rounds if all we're supposed to do is help Phobos Security with a little crowd control. Berenger hates when anybody questions him, so I didn't say anything. Last time I questioned him I spent three nights in solitary. Berenger hasn't trusted me from the beginning — not since he read my dossier and found out why my last superior officer is currently in Alaska with a body cast — so he's harder on me than the rest.

Max has been at the radio for about twenty minutes and still no response. Now my stomach's all knotted up, and I'm pretty sure most of us are beginning to wonder if there's more to our visit than Berenger let on about in the briefing. Be no surprise at this point. Nobody tells the grunts jack shit. Nobody tells us what goes on in the "Anomaly" labs on Phobos and Deimos. Nobody was straight with us about what happened to Janssen or Carlyle. Rowlins is fingering his cross again. Something must be up if Kinney's been quiet for more than ten seconds. Then again, it's probably just shellshock creeping up on me, making me paranoid. Hell, the jackass admins probably never shipped them any guns in the first place.

Berenger just gave the word to park the shuttle and secure all helmets. Looks like we're going to ring the doorbell.

3

When I first arrived on Mars, except for the cloudless khaki sky, it was like early morning in the desert. Red atmospheric haze hanging in the air, endless wasteland pocketed with scars insisting the landscape once flourished with life, gusts of red dust from hurricanes that always seemed to be brewing nearby. Phobos has no wind, and no color, and it doesn't bullshit anyone: nothing ever flourished here. It's a horrifying little rock.

Mad Max — the most carefree, cool-headed, rough-and-tumble bitch I ever met — is scared shitless of Phobos. Ever since Janssen was relocated here, only to die a week later in a work-related accident nobody would disclose any details about, she refused to even get out of the shuttle on her deliveries. We figure she saw what happened to Janssen, but she won't say. Max is by best friend on the Red Planet — in two months we've shared every personal detail about ourselves that we wouldn't share with our own mothers. She claims to trust me more than anybody on Mars. Yet whenever I ask her why she hates Phobos, she clams up and avoids me, just like Rowlins thinking back on the war.

So after a quick radio test, when Berenger ordered everyone to gear up and get out, and made it clear that he meant everyone, Max responded like a deer standing in the headlights of a speeding 4x4. Making Berenger repeat himself is like an offense to God Almighty. He grabbed her arm, dragged her out of her seat, and just about hurled her skinny ass out the door. Fact is he didn't trust her not to take off without us, on account of the Janssen incident. He said specifically, "She makes another unscheduled return trip to Mars without her passengers, I'll drop-kick her back to Earth without a suit."

I've been tasked with guarding the ship in Max's place while the rest of the team sweeps the facility for threats. I'm packing my sidearm and nothing else, and I got a hunch it's not just because we only brought eight shotguns. Berenger has probably been looking for a shit job to give me for months, but all jobs on Mars are shit jobs.

"Your envirosuit's got four days of air, Sarge. If you run out, just hold your breath 'til we get back."

Kinney and McGee didn't even try to hide their laughs, the little pricks. Rowlins at least gave me a sympathetic smile and a pat on the arm. Max said nothing as she marched off with the team, throwing this puppy-dog look over her shoulder that I wasn't sure how to interpret. Probably directed at the shuttle.

Like an aircraft carrier, the Phobos Base hangar is managed from a building perched on one side of the deck (I think navy boys call it an "island"), except this one is stout, donut-shaped, and its roof is cluttered with a dozen radar antennae, a hundred-foot control tower, and a Plexiglas dome in the center. The island is basically Phobos Base's head, the flight deck its bib, the heavy airlock doors on the building's face its mouth.

The doors closed behind them ten minutes ago. I been sitting here ever since, admiring the scenery.

From this perspective, the facility lacks Mars Base's sleek space-station look: Phobos Base is a cluster of nine titanium-reinforced buildings sprawled in a jagged line across the center of a mile-wide crater, like the pathetic remains of a space hulk after an emergency crash-landing. Control towers, radar dishes, solar panels, and other extensions are literally scattered across the top of the base; cargo elevators, cranes, and maintenance catwalks stitch the patchwork facility together. The northernmost structures are conjoined like Siamese twins: the larger one, which I'm pretty sure is Phobos Labs, has two gigantic solar panels planted in the roof; the other is half its size and buried partway in the side of a cliff like it's trying to hide in shame. I assume it's the Anomaly I've been hearing about for two months.

This shit-hole hovers so close to its daddy that the sky is claustrophobic. I swear I've seen something like it in a bad dream where I'm standing alone in a lifeless void, looking up and seeing nothing but a world-sized bloodshot eye looming directly overhead, all the breath leaving my chest as I wait for it to land and crush me at any moment.

God, I can't wait to leave already. It's way too quiet here.

4

I'm kicking back on the shuttle's roof, listening to the team's chatter and gazing out across the gorgeous Phobos landscape, or what little I can see of it over the lip of the crater. And if it's anything like the rest of the moon's surface, I can already tell I'm not missing anything. An eternity of dull gray hills, pock-marked with craters of all sizes. I had my fill of gray at Mars Base, so my eyes are aching from boredom. Fortunately I noticed a handful of Martian debris floating off in the distance that's far less oppressive than the ugly sky, and somewhat interesting to stare at while waiting for somebody to say something.

excerpt from audio log

ROWLINS: Two people manning the control tower at any given time, right?

KINNEY: That what it says in the manual?

ROWLINS: I thought it was policy or something. There should be somebody here at all times, right?

MAX: I dunno. Shuttlecraft don't land more than once a month. But there should always be somebody mannin' the radio in Command Control, no exceptions.

MCGEE: Don't forget who's runnin' this circus. I could round up a team o' shit-flingin' chimps to call the shots here, they'd still have their act together better than these fuckin' idiots.

BERENGER: Can it, McGee.

KINNEY: Hahaha! Waitaminnit, chimps? Where do Petro an' Trog enlist?

PETRO: Shut up, Kinney.

ROWLINS: How many staff members here, Cap'n?

BERENGER: About four hundred employees from all Mars Base branches, divvied up between Phobos and Deimos. I'm not sure how they split 'em up per station.

ROWLINS: I don't suppose they would all take their lunch breaks at once?

KINNEY: Hey, I thought they was understaffed. We the cavalry, right?

BUTCH: Yeah, I thought we was backup?

MAX: God, I can't think with you assholes blabberin'!

MCGEE: Max is so hot when she's angry. Keep talkin', baby.

KINNEY: Hahahahaha!

BERENGER: Enough chatter! Barrett, sift through those desks for security cards so we don't have to force open every door in this hole.

MAX: Yessir.

TRAGUE: Nobody in the bathrooms, Cap'n.

BERENGER: Everyone regroup. Rec room. Now. Sarge, report your status every five minutes so I know you're awake out there.

Talk is mostly minimal, except for Berenger barking orders and the occasional burst of bullshit. Lately it's been quiet. Last thing I heard, the team was heading into the next junction and splitting into two groups — Berenger, Trague, Rowlins, and McGee to the nuclear plant to check for leaks; Max, Kinney, Petro, and Butch to Command Control to find the security chief.

Still as a goddamned graveyard. My eyes keep returning to those odd, roundish bits of Martian debris in the distance just to keep my mind off the quiet. I don't even know if it is debris, and there's no way to tell how big they are because they're so far away. The way they're just drifting along, must be asteroids. They say Phobos is going to break up into pieces eventually, and the same must be happening to Mars. I've noticed more since last time I was staring out there. Did a head count of nineteen rust-red floaters. UAC-Earth is probably watching them now with their fancy telescopes.

excerpt from audio log

MAX: Assholes…

MCGEE: What's up, Max?

MAX: They don't even have rovin' patrols. No fuckin' organization up here.

MCGEE: Don't go bustin' any mad scientist heads without me, now. I mean it.

MAX: No wonder they got so many problems up here.

BERENGER: Keep the line clear.

MAX: Yessir.

PETRO: Yessir.

KINNEY: Petro, you say anything in English other than "Yessir"?

PETRO: Shut up, Kinney.

KINNEY: And "Shut up, Kinney"?

BERENGER: Kinney, you better zip it up if you wanna be on that shuttle when it returns to Mars.

MCGEE: Hope Sarge ain't too lonely out there.

Max's voice was rough when she spoke, like her vocal chords had tightened up. She can't be nearly as unnerved as me, though: sitting out in this void, alone. Truth is I wouldn't mind a little company right now, other than this PDA and these damn floating rocks. I count twenty-two now. Guess they come out gradually, like the stars at nightfall.

5

It's been quiet for a long time. Hours. Maybe a day. I can't tell now.

Except for the voices. The voices never shut up.

Two hours searching the nuclear plant and Command Control. Not a god damned soul. Nobody knew what to do, so the radio was silent except for the meaningless "uh's" and broken phrases typical of people scared out of their wits, and Berenger's order to advance to Phobos Labs. Berenger was the only one keeping his cool — I could hear in the other marines' voices that something wasn't right. Rowlins whispered prayers under his breath again. Kinney wasn't joking anymore. Never a good sign when Kinney takes a situation seriously.

Not really anything I could do, being so far from the group. Almost didn't realize I was locked in a squatting position on the shuttle's roof, like my body was ready to leap into action without me.

Rowlins's prayers grew louder and his voice trembled like someone standing in an Earthquake. He recited one psalm after another, hardly stopping for breath.

I finally remembered my vocal chords. "Berenger, what's wrong with Rowlins?"

Rowlins didn't respond to anyone, not even Berenger, but it didn't matter when we heard the gagging and wretching — McGee puking his guts out and trying to spew obscenities at the same time. Trague mumbling like he forgot how to form words. Eventually McGee found the breath between dry-heaves to scream like a wolverine caught in a bear trap.

excerpt from audio log

MAX: Captain, what's goin' on over there?

KINNEY: Quiet…

TRAGUE: F-Face…what happened to his…?

MCGEE: Jee-zuss-Fuck…

TRAGUE: What happened t…?

MCGEE: Trog, over here…There's more of 'em over here…Jesus…

BERENGER: Toughen up, Marine. Get a hold o' your gut and cut them down. Surgical tools in the case over there.

MAX: McGee, what's going on over there? What'd you find—?

KINNEY: Quiet! Listen!

Silence again, except for Rowlins's sermon. McGee struggling to hold back another episode. Max's trembling breath. My own heartbeat.

A long, horrible scream from the belly of the animal kingdom.

Gunshots. Endless gunshots. Kinney and Petro shouting every curse word they ever knew. Butch snarling in agony and primal fury while Max shouted, "Man down! Man down!" Under fire. Somebody was shooting back.

Cartilage tearing and popping. Another scream, this time in Trague's voice — long and guttural, the kind that ravages the larynx. More gunfire, Berenger shouting the order to fall back, other sounds impossible to describe that my memory is still struggling to comprehend. Kinney started laughing and hooting like a maniac.

excerpt from audio log

KINNEY: Got you, motherfucker! Got you, motherf—! Where you goin'?

PETRO: Goddamned eyes! Their goddamned eyes!

KINNEY: Where you goin', huh? Can't hide from me, you little bitch! Can't hide from me!

MAX: Don't—! Kinney, Petro, wait! Wait! Don't leave us here!

BERENGER: Kinney! Fall back! That's an order!

KINNEY: We got 'im, Petro! Got this motherfucker onna run! We got 'im!

MAX: Kinney! Captain, Butch is goin' into shock!

BERENGER: Kinney, fall back now! They're trying to cut us off! Fall back!

MCGEE: There was nothin' there!

MAX: Captain, they hit an artery!

MCGEE: Where they comin' from? There was nothin' there!

BERENGER: Sarge, keep that goddamn shuttle in one piece! Stay at your post!

I lost track of the time. Hour after hour they swung back and forth — inconsolable blubbering and raving; frenzied screaming and shooting — back and forth, back and forth. Berenger shouted orders that nobody seemed to hear or care about. And through it all to the very end, Trague's screams came back again and again, like his worst nightmare had him in its hands and wouldn't let him go. Nobody knew where he was.

They'd scattered, scrambling through the hallways, babbling, crying, cursing, and finally regrouping only to scatter again. Virgin recruits, first skirmish, whole unit slaughtered, too confused to call for help. Petro kept talking about the eyes. He screamed about the eyes when the dogs got him. That was the last thing I heard for a long time. Rowlins wasn't praying anymore, and Berenger was quiet.

Phobos was quiet. Dead quiet.

Periodically the radio would emit a weird sound, but never anything identifiable; too distant from my team's headsets to register clearly, but some managed to put strangely specific images in my head. A team of chefs carving watermelons with dull knives. Someone recovering from a grueling workout. A blowtorch exhausting its fuel supply. Feeding time in a kennel. All popping up to break the stillness at random intervals from sixty seconds to a half hour — random enough to jolt me every time. I'd freeze and strain my ears until the silence returned, sometimes for so long my muscles started to cramp. Then, for a while, everything was calm again. No sounds at all.

It must've been shock that kept me from speaking, or the fear that so much as opening my mouth would cause another catastrophe. Phobos Base seemed to wait for a cue; off in the distance, the Anomaly stared at me, daring me to say something, like it would do any good.

They won't respond. They're dead. They're dead and I'm next.

Claustrophobia pushed shell-shock aside. Three days plus of oxygen in my suit and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe, or speak, or think.

I sat hoping and praying to hear anybody say anything to slow my spinning head when I heard the first voice — faint and distorted, its language meaningless like when people talk in dreams. Only said maybe two words, neither of which I could make any sense of, then it clammed up.

Ten minutes later it started talking again with a partner, both equally warped in pitch and vibration, speaking only two to four unintelligible words at a time. At this point I knew my mind had gone right out the window. Odd that I took this new-found schizophrenia so well. I just thought, Okay. I'm crazy. Guess that's it, then. After two or three hours there must've been half a dozen chattering away in demented baby-talk, and they got louder and clearer every time they spoke up.

Stranded on a lifeless rock with no pilot for the shuttle and no contact with the rest of humanity, alone except for the chorus of ghosts prattling endlessly in my ears — hissing the words, making my head throb and ache. I wanted them to go away so bad my eyes welled up. I wanted to hear my teammates, to hear Max, or Rowlins, or even that asshole Berenger. Somebody has to be okay, I thought. I can't be the only one left.

I took a deep breath to brush the wrinkles out of my throat. Waited a few seconds for my spit to come back.

"Status report," I said.

The voices stopped. The entire facility went silent again.

"Somebody gimme a status report," I said. "Captain, come in."

I waited fifteen minutes for a response, staring out at the fleet of reddish floaters in the distance that seemed to multiply every time I blinked, now totaling over a hundred.

One floater moved like a startled fly while the voices murmured.

I leapt from the shuttle and scrambled inside the hangar, sealing the airlock doors behind me.

The air traffic control tower is the highest vantage point in Phobos Base, standing a hundred feet above the roof of the island. From here, I have a depressingly clear view of the moon's faceless horizon in every direction. Migrating inside turned out to be a questionable move, though. If I had stayed downstairs I would never have known that those "asteroids" are floating less than a quarter-mile over the moon's surface. And if I had stayed outside, I might have actually gone crazy and never realized that these ghostly voices are coming from my radio headset.

I wish I __was__ crazy. Fear sweeps over a sound mind in full force.

6

I can't stay here. There's nowhere to run if I get cornered. I have to move. Get to Command Control and find better protection. Might find easier access to the ventilation ducts in the residential sector. Curl up in a corner and wait for a rescue shuttle. I feel naked out in the open.

They know I'm here. They know and they're coming for me.

7

Someone screamed on the radio a minute ago. Might have been Kinney, or maybe Rowlins. My ears are still ringing.

Before I left, I managed to find a layout of Phobos Base in the hangar security office. Only useful thing to find in the entire building. I searched every loading dock and every storage room; except for a few empty crates and three cases of UAC nutri-bars, they were all completely bare like no one had used the facility in decades. Nutri-bars aren't much of a dinner, but my hunger got vicious the moment I saw them. Started to feel a little better. Not by much.

This whole base was designed by a lunatic. The rooms and hallways are more spacious than I expected, and nearly all the walls stained khaki — a welcome change from the dull white-and-gray of Mars Base — but the architecture is all wrong, like the designer thought a practical space station would be too boring and opted for abstract art instead. Beneath the huge dome on the center of the island's roof was an outdoor area with a big pool of churning brown fluid (probably reactor coolant to keep the hangar's nuclear capacitor from melting itself) and the whole building wrapped around this area like my hand around a beer can, forming a single semicircular path. There's no way to enter the base from this end without taking an extensive tour of the hangar first. It's about as practical as a goddamn funhouse. I can imagine the accidents, crate-toting workers tripping over scurrying launch control operators and vice-versa.

Since the residential sector is adjacent to the hangar it was easy enough to find, though the door to that sector was inoperable and I had to rat-crawl through a maintenance tunnel in the floor to get to the other side. The floor plan showed the whole area was laid out like a prison, only without the symmetry. A three-block labyrinth of cold, snaking hallways lined with cramped apartments, all branching out from a thirty-by-thirty-foot lobby.

The voices got chatty again when I got there. They hadn't been very talkative for a while, but now it seemed something had caught their interest. Then they stopped.

From the lobby entrance the right side of the room was furnished with three sofas, two arcade cabinets, and a potted tropical plant wedged in one corner. On the left side a television monitor was mounted on the wall at head-level, its shattered screen gouting sparks every few minutes. The shadows hung thick on the walls because only half the ceiling lights were functioning properly; the rest kept flickering weakly.

Blackness swallowed each of the three corridors, so I could only see a few meters in. According to the overhead map, the hall ahead of me led to the west employee apartment blocks; the hall to my left led to the south blocks; and the rightmost hall cut through the north block to the rec room, lockers, mess hall, and the rest of the facility (unless the other sector doors weren't working, either). I drew my sidearm, picked the middle path and stepped into the shadows, hoping the cover of darkness would work to my advantage if my team's murderers happened through the area. Unless they had the dogs with them.

I should've had that light on before I left the lobby, to save myself the shock. Thirty feet in, a power surge swept through Phobos Base and briefly sent all the electronics on the fritz. Every light in the residential block flickered once and gave me a clear, split-second view of the hallway. It was long enough.

I don't know why I hadn't recognized the rotten stench in the air until that very moment when my feet turned to cement. Something inside my gut started screaming uncontrollably and drove my heart into my throat until I couldn't breathe. My eyes were playing tricks on me. They had to be.

I flicked on my Maglite. The shadows retreated some fifteen feet down the corridor and revealed three more apartment doors on either side, two bashed in with a battering ram. Buckshot scratches scarred the dull gray walls, and all the way to the edge of the Maglite's beam everything had been carelessly painted with dark red splashes, the floor smeared with giant, bloody strokes that still gleamed wet.

My gut twisted, begging that I get out of there. The voices had been quiet for too long. Something small and flesh-colored lay just outside the beam's reach, right in the middle of the corridor. I couldn't tear my eyes away. I considered moving closer to see what it was. My gut won out and I turned back toward the lobby.

Pure survival instinct saved my life. He'd snuck up behind me like my own shadow, and I barely recognized his UAC-issue security vest before my rational mind froze at the sight of the pistol barrel a mere inch from pressing into my eye; the colorless, smirking mouth behind it, chin wet with cannibalized blood; the emerald fire blazing in the back of two gaping eye sockets. I snapped into autopilot, my arms locking around his wrist, twisting his arm into a pretzel and shattering his face against the wall. I slammed my pistol's butt across the back of his head and he instantly dropped to the floor, his neck probably broken, skull fractured. Petro's panicked cries echoed in my memory and didn't stop until I'd fired every round into the sonofabitch's back and those eyes had extinguished.

My memory is foggy here. I retreated to the couches, covering my nose and mouth to keep my bile down, hands still trembling, knees struggling to keep me upright. I had my eyes on the lobby entrance while I backed toward the right-side hall, the stink of sweat and lead fumes and fresh blood blending and stirring in my nostrils. I don't know why I was watching the door. Paranoia setting in — that damn devil-speak, not sure whether it was on my headset or outside the lobby entrance. Eardrums throbbed from the gunshots. I know I heard footsteps. My memory was still trying to push the image of that hallway aside so I could focus. That fleshy thing on the floor. That smirking nightmare that'd nearly taken me. I didn't want to see another one so soon, not while my mind still struggled with the first.

Someone came in, pistol drawn, sights set on my last known position. Sharp green blaze in empty, bloody eye sockets like high-beams late at night. I opened fire. Two rounds hit him square in the upper chest, but as he stumbled to the floor two more former humans took his place. I high-tailed it through the north apartment block, firing blindly over my shoulder. I don't know if I hit anything.

I remember running, but none of the scenery comes together right. It's all in fragments. Everywhere I turned, I heard that damned devil-speech around the next corner or in an adjacent room. I had no idea where I was going, and those things just kept coming. For each that I shot down, two or three more showed up, screaming gibberish and guns blazing. In my panic I'd used all my spare mags. Running around unarmed and too waist-deep in Fight-or-Flight to think straight. I found myself at a side-entrance to the mess hall, no idea how I got there. Ducked inside and snuck into the kitchen.

Every ceiling lamp dangled in broken pieces and let out an occasional crackling spark, so the only light in the kitchen came from the dull green glow of the mess hall door's "unlocked" light. I could see just well enough to keep from crashing into the countertops and find where the butcher's knives were stored. With the largest blade in hand I knelt behind the furthest counter, breathing as quietly as I could and hoping my eyes would adjust to the darkness before somebody came looking for me.

That's when I heard her.

"…Is anybody there…?"

Had the voices been chattering at the time I would never have picked it up: a weak, trembling voice on my team's frequency, whispering like the whole base would fall apart if she spoke any louder.

My heart was pounding in my throat. I whispered back, "Max, that you?"

The demons murmured. Nothing else.

"Max, come in," I said, a bit louder. "Is that you? Are you okay?"

A long pause. Then an exhausted sob. "No…"

I tried to ask her what happened and got a fit of strangled weeping in response. A trembling virgin recruit in Pakistan, mind and body numb to everything. Morale shaken out like a loose bolt. Wishing she could go home. Broken like glass from her first taste of death.

Max lost her little brother in the war. He'd died screaming in her arms. She's no virgin. She knows Death real well.

"Max," I said, "talk to me. Please."

"I don't know…I don't know anything…I don't know…"

"Where are you? Can you tell me that at least?"

She held her breath, went quiet for a long time. More whispers from the demons. A brief sound on Max's end like a heavy metal table dragging on the floor.

A frightened sob.

"Max," I said, "you read me?"

"No…"

"Max, tell me where you are and—"

"It's here, oh Jesus, it's here…I c-can't…!"

The dragging again, then nothing. That's the last I've heard on the radio for an hour and a half.

I found an easy entryway to the ventilation ducts above the kitchen stove, so I've spent most of that time sneaking around, dodging the cameras and watching the zombie-things from the safety of the air vents. They're not human, I know it. They look human; they look like Mars Patrol officers, and some of them look like the guys that stepped off the shuttle with me my first day on Mars. I don't know how to describe it. They just don't move right. Their mannerisms aren't natural, like puppets on strings. They move like they're doing impressions of human beings.

My priorities have changed. I can't wait for a rescue shuttle. Max can't afford to wait, so I'm not waiting either. Stopped a while ago to rest my limbs before I make the long crawl to Command Control. There has to be a working radio there.

8

Some of the air ducts lead into the maintenance tunnel networks that span the ceiling and underbelly of the facility. Because of this I managed to get the drop on an unwary zombie patrol a while ago. I've got a shotgun now, and an armored security vest. I may survive this clusterfuck yet.

I only saw the one at first. He didn't hear me when I crept out of the open maintenance hatch. He didn't know I was there until he felt the butcher knife in his neck. Squirmed like an angry fish, but he didn't make a peep and went limp pretty quick. His shotgun's clatter gave me away to his patrol buddy around the corner and down the next hall, who came running like a good marine, hissing in devil-speak. I was waiting for him when he came into view. The shotgun's barrel touched his forehead.

I recognized McGee's face a split-second before it disintegrated.

Slowly but surely I'm coming to terms with these things lumbering about. I don't freeze in place or go into a panic when I see them anymore. Now what really unsettles and confuses me are the more subtle oddities.

The dogs, for one. I haven't seen them yet, but their snarls keep playing over and over in my memory with the screams of my teammates. There aren't any animals on Mars, so I don't understand why any would reside on either of the moons. And I'm scared to find out if they've somehow been twisted into monsters just like the Mars Patrol officers.

The vest I procured, for another: it's branded as UAC-Deimos property. That one I just can't figure out. What the hell is Deimos personnel doing on Phobos? How the hell did they get here without a shuttle?

I tried contacting Max again, but still can't get a peep out of her. The demon voices aren't talking back, either.

9

I can't get any sleep. Nightmares keep yanking me out of it.

I dreamed of a bloody sky descending slowly toward me, grinding mountains and buildings into gravel and covering the planet surface with cascades of rubble. The sky rained…things. I can't describe them. Thinking back on them makes me shudder with adolescent terror. But they were alive and converging on me just like that great red eye overhead. The avalanches buried me, and the sky pressed on, forcing the breath out of my lungs until I couldn't scream anymore. I was on Earth. I was alone.

Moving through the vents must be the source of these claustrophobic dreams. I feel like a caver trapped inside the bowels of a cold, titanium planet. The ducts are tight as a casket: I can only fit through by lying on my stomach, keeping my arms outstretched like a diver and my head turned at an angle. I inch my way through by pushing with my toes, and I don't stop until I reach the next junction.

I've been slithering like this for…I have no idea how long. I've lost track of the time. I know for sure it's been at least two days since I lost contact with my team. The junctions give me enough room to sit up and rest, but it feels like a mile or so between each one, and I'm still not halfway to Command Control. Having to relieve myself on the go hasn't made things any more pleasant. I'm zipped up in a UAC envirosuit, wading in my own filth. If I slap my helmet down right now the smell will probably smother me.

My map isn't as useful as I'd hoped. I think I might be lost. The very thought makes me want to scream, but I can't so much as let my stomach growl because the zombie patrols lumbering past every few minutes are sure to hear it. I'm canned pork if they sniff me out.

The voices still talk occasionally, but they've been mostly quiet all day.

10

Sabotaged the security systems beyond repair and blinded the enemy to my whereabouts. Safest course of action in light of that unnamable thing I saw.

What in the holy hell were these maniacs doing up here?

Using the air ducts to travel spared me hours of walking in circles. The crazy architect that designed Phobos Base really let himself go with Command Control: the floor plan made me think of the path a confused lab rat would take through a maze, right down to every wrong turn, but because that sector's ducts were in the ceiling I bypassed all of it. The few rooms to be found in those dizzy corridors were cluttered with computer stations elevated ten to fifteen feet off the floor and only accessible via security lifts. God knows why. Maybe to keep the workers from tripping over each other like they do in the hangar.

Every corridor branched out from the central hub — an extra large computer station elevated like the others and encased in a twenty-foot cylindrical tower. Plexiglas panes comprised the tower's upper walls so the control freak supervisors could watch who came and went at all times.

The air vents led to a small three-way junction directly above the hub, with a single vent in its base that allowed me to drop into the place. Only one zombie marine had been stationed there, and I cut him down as he turned around — nailed him right under the left arm where his security vest couldn't protect him. Nobody seemed to hear the shots because nobody came to his aid. I should count my blessings from now on.

All along the station's walls, supercomputers clicked and whirred, grinding out useless data; fax machines and printers stood like crumbling headstones, all of them devastated with blunt force or buckshot; television sets that once displayed Earth's news channels or pay-per-view events flickered silently, eerie reddish jellyfish arms snaking across every screen. In the middle of the room stood four computer consoles as wide as executive desks, with two chairs and four security monitors assigned to each.

Against the eastern wall sat the radio I'd been desperate to find for so many hours — smashed open and crudely dissected, its wires and innards broken and scattered all across the station's floor. I stared in shock for a long time like they were my own guts, my step faltering as I approached, one hand outstretched with the hope that it was all an illusion. The microphone remained so mockingly intact I lost my temper and slapped it off the desk. I collapsed in the radio operator's chair, holding my head while my eyes fogged up. Would've started crying right then if I hadn't looked down at the carpet.

Dark red splashes stained the floor beneath my left foot and formed a crooked trail leading off further left, which my eyes slowly followed until they came to a sudden halt at the trail's origin, crammed behind a broken fax machine where I couldn't see it previously from the middle of the room.

He looked like a broken doll, sprawled in a K that bordered on humorous, head twisted and arched back, the skull split open and hollowed out. I slipped out of the chair with my mouth opened wide in a silent scream.

I blinked and it was gone. Nothing there but dried red stains.

A few rooms away, somewhere to the north, dogs began to howl. I froze and listened with ice trickling down my face, listening for the sounds of galloping paws and clinking dog tags. I still wasn't sure if there was a mangled Science Officer sprawled five feet away or not. I kept looking at that spot and seeing nothing.

Then I heard that frantic breath on my headset again. It sounded like a woman's voice.

"Max," I said, "if you can hear me, listen close. I'm coming to find you. Wherever you are, stay put. Stay invisible. If you can hear me, please acknowledge. Don't tell me where you are. They're listening. Just…let me know you're alive out there."

I stood for a long time, listening, waiting. Something squirmed inside my chest. Couldn't swallow for some reason.

"…acknowledged…"

Finally I heard that crackly voice somewhere on the other end. My lips pulled back all the way to my ears and I nearly laughed out loud.

"Okay. I'll find you, Max. I promise. Now ditch your headset."

Haven't heard from her since.

The Phobos Labs cameras fed Command Control nothing but static. The other sectors didn't have much more to show besides empty rooms and deserted corridors. One camera in the residential sector stood watch over the lobby where I'd been attacked, staring down the western corridor. My skin crawled: I'd had the damn thing on my back the entire time. A squad of fully armed zombie marines was sweeping through that area, checking every apartment. They didn't know where I was.

The bottom-right monitor of each console was linked with a spidery-legged roving security bot like the ones on Mars, controlled remotely by a video game joystick. The flip of a switch would toggle the monitor between the primary system and the bots' system. Three bots showed only snow; the fourth, a blue screen with the word "STANDBY" in white letters.

"Sarge, that you?"

A haggard voice on my team's frequency nearly catapulted my heart from my chest. It was Berenger. And apart from sounding like he'd just run the Marathon, he spoke with his same old macho demeanor like it was just another day on the battlefield. I acknowledged with more enthusiasm than I care to admit.

"Petro's here," he said. "He's in bad shape. We're holed up in the nuclear plant with plenty of ammo, but we can't stay here forever. He needs to get to the infirmary. I could use some bourbon, myself."

"I hear that," I laughed.

Something snarled on the other end, and a shotgun blast replied.

Berenger had sealed the nuclear plant's main doors so the only way in was through the refinery's maintenance tunnels. He wanted a rendezvous at the refinery's eastern quadrant. I noticed a trace of exhilaration in his voice. Veteran's High.

"You'll have to move fast," he said. "I can't. Not while dragging this sack o' hamburger."

Even now, in spite of how much I hate him, knowing Berenger is alive fortifies my weary nerves and my quivering stomach. His brand of crazy can guarantee my survival. He could probably plow a path to the hangar all by himself. He could probably figure out how to fly the shuttle back to Mars, even without Max.

But Max is alive. She's alive and she's all alone with a broken spirit. She trusts me, and I'm not about to betray that trust. I'll be damned if I'm gonna abandon her to fend for herself in this shithole. I explained this much to Berenger even though my defiance pisses him off more than anything. I expected him to explode in a hurricane of curses, but he kept quiet for a long time. When it seemed like we had nothing to argue about I began to sign off, recommending we keep the line clear until we regrouped.

He wasn't the same man when he spoke again. His voice was soft. Shaken.

"You've seen them," he said. "Haven't you? You've seen the men. How they've changed."

I said nothing. It was answer enough for him.

"Possessed," he went on. "They crawl inside their heads and strangle their minds 'til everything they once were shrivels into nothing. They got to her. They'll get to you. You can't trust her, Sarge. She's gone. She's one of them."

She's our only ticket off of this rock. I almost blurted it out right then — almost slapped a demon price tag around her neck — but somehow I managed to bite my tongue.

Berenger knew about the radio. The sonofabitch. He knew damn well about the radio, the sonofabitch. He'd severed the Phobos modem, too. Saw to it that we could never call for help. We had no right, he said. We had no right to call for reinforcements like these dumb fuckers did. To spread this disease to the Mars colony. To Earth. Somehow I didn't care. My rage boiled over and I tore into his ass until I couldn't breathe. Can't remember anything I said, but I know if we'd stood face-to-face just then I would've shot him.

He waited patiently for me to simmer down, then calmly said, "This is our mess, Soldier. Get your ass to the refinery. That's an order."

"I'm not leaving anybody behind, Cap'n," I said. "I'm resuming my sweep of the facility. I'm gonna find her whether she's alive or dead. You can court-martial me later."

Berenger didn't say anything. Military discipline took a back seat to survival at that point, and I think he knew it. His closing words were in a drawn-out whisper. "There are worse things than the dead, Sarge."

The line went quiet after that. Elsewhere, the dogs started up again. My hand found the security bot's joystick.

The bot appeared to be in working order, discarded on a mass grave of broken electronics junk: motherboards, computer towers, laptops, a few PDAs. One leg was buried in the junk, but after a little coaxing I shimmied him loose and he tumbled down the pile onto the floor. Then it took about ten minutes figuring out how to make him move where I wanted him to.

Driving the bot into the hallway I found Phobos Labs wasn't laid out much better than Command Control, though at least every turn led me somewhere instead of in circles. Most of the lights had broken here, too, just like everywhere else, but I could see well enough that Phobos Labs didn't take to the khaki color scheme, favoring rooms of olive green tiles connected by marble white corridors. Many of the once polished walls were flecked with shotgun pellets and gore, the floor in a few areas smeared with blood and shit and other vileness. A severed finger, an eyeball…and the shadows…

Maybe it wasn't the shadows. I don't know. Something moved in there, but my bot's camera feed wasn't so good, like someone had drop-kicked it a few times too many. I'm certain I saw shapes on the prowl. Human silhouettes moving against a blue-gray backdrop, their eyes the only detail — small, yellowish specks of light, like dying stars. They saw the bot exploring the halls, but only froze in place and stared like startled alley cats until it went out of sight. Christ, my hands are shaking just from thinking back on it, and that isn't the worst of it.

Many of the offices, their doors bashed in just like the residential block, served as makeshift storerooms for looted crates of equipment and more junk piles. Phobos security's entire stock of shotguns, pistols, and ammunition were stockpiled in at least two, which I've marked on my map with a note to pilfer them in the near future. Construction materials cluttered a few others — jackhammers, crane repair tools, explosive charges, and the like — used to expand the installation when the S.S.O.'s called for it. If I'm really lucky, I'll find some UAC prototype weapons in one of those rooms, like the M397 gatling gun they sent up two weeks ago, or the BFG 9000 I've been hearing rumors about. I would give ten years off my life for one of those right now.

I couldn't access most of the labs or the Central Processing plant, because all the sector doors were either sealed or inoperable. After an hour of scouting the area, looking for Max, and waiting for someone to open the doors for me, I found a cargo elevator just in time to catch someone on his way down. I veered the bot behind an empty crate that had been shoved against the corridor wall, which turned out too small to hide the little bastard behind.

The elevator door folded into the ceiling and two technicians stepped out, faces and jumpsuits smeared with blood, empty eye sockets glowing an evil green. They walked right past the bot, lumbering awkwardly but with a purpose. Heavy metal clanking, and the elevator door began to collapse into place again.

A sign above the door read "Phobos Anomaly".

Something compelled me to maneuver the bot through those doors as fast as I could push it. I'd done it before I'd realized it.

According to my map, that sector was diminutive compared to the others, little more than a residential block in length. And, unlike its brothers, its layout was perfectly straightforward: a circular security checkpoint; a long, broad corridor; two parallel data storage rooms; another long, broad corridor; a massive magnetically sealed door; a warehouse-sized laboratory.

My stomach knotted and twisted. Apart from their code names, the Anomalies were never spoken of on Mars except among the admins, and nobody but the admins knew what went on in either. Top secret military shit. Maybe something that'd solve world hunger or bring an end to war. Maybe something that'd annihilate the human race. It was something big, whatever it was.

Metallic rattling as the elevator reached the top. On the little security screen I watched a rusty brown cargo door straining to lift itself with a groan. The elevator opened its maw nice and wide, revealing

My God.

Somehow my fingers moved on their own, driving the security bot forward through the nightmare, completely unnoticed by the S.O.'s shambling about their business, rummaging through crate after crate.

Thirty of them, probably more, grinning and drooling like demon kindergarteners as they threw random electronic appliances and tools over their shoulders. One leapt to his feet screeching with joy when he found what he was looking for, scampered down the long black corridor to the lab entrance at the end, tripping over his own feet in his excitement.

Painted. The marble gray walls were painted, floor to ceiling, in human expulsions and coagulated blood. Prints of scrambling hands and feet desperate for escape or writhing in agony; some more deliberate, forming demonic sigils and letters from a language I'd never seen before.

A form sat slouched against one wall, stripped of its clothes, limply-hanging head shattered from a bullet wound. I didn't stop to look. I drove on down the corridor.

My bot passed the record rooms, throwing only a quick glance into the one on its left. Overturned file cabinets inside, papers scattered across the floor, some drifting into the hallway from the breath of the threshold vent. More bodies, piled like logs, stripped of their clothes and their skin. A Mars Patrol officer knelt over one, hard at work like carving a Christmas turkey.

From behind the bot another S.O. screeched happily and darted after the first, passing in front of the camera in a blur. Nobody noticed the security bot scuttling around their feet, even when they tripped over it in their hurry…or maybe they just had more important things on their minds.

Only three feet from the magnetic door. It began to draw itself upward, a great steel curtain rising to reveal the horror show's finale. The two S.O.'s squirmed underneath like rats impatient to get to a food source. My heart kicked the inside of my throat again and again. I wondered if the enemy could hear it on the radio. The doorway was clear now.

More S.O.'s and technicians hard at work. They'd torn up every maintenance cover and now crawled in and out of the tunnels like worms in a dead man, doing God-knows-what to the machinery inside. There may have been dozens of incredible things going on in that lab, but I only cared about what stood before the camera twelve feet ahead.

A short flight of catwalk steps. A platform branching into two small control stations set twenty feet apart. Between them, a great black whirlpool of nothingness, pulsing and swirling as though it were alive, tunneling leagues and leagues through the abyss as twisted arms of mist lashed out angrily at a world that confused and repulsed them.

A titan form stood before it, towering over my tiny bot. The camera jittered and suddenly rose several feet into the air — high above the head of the tallest human being — stopping with a jerk at a pair of eyes searing with green fire that quickly began to melt the lens. I saw man and goat coexisting in the same sneering face. I felt a legion of frozen spiders burrow out of my stomach and swarm over every inch of my skin, an unnatural cold so shocking I cried out.

The thing gazed at me. It gazed into the camera, through the monitor, and saw me.

In the next instant, the picture turned to static.

Anguished howls tore through the computer station. The eerie red jellyfish lines took shape and two dozen monitors screamed at me with alien voices and pale, twisted faces that once belonged to humans, eyes clawed out, mouths starved and shriveled into vicious slits, flesh scarred and bubbling from volcanic heat — screaming and scowling, clawing with filthy nails, trying to get at me through the screens, seeing me through the screens.

I would've run, but my wooden limbs wouldn't respond. I wanted to run. My heart tried to burst out of my chest to escape. Streaming tears blinded me.

Static. The monitors were lifeless. Ears ringing from the screams, if they'd even been real. If it weren't for the explosion, I would've collapsed in a faint.

Clouds of smoke and powdered glass filled the room as one of the Plexiglas panels exploded with a grenade burst and a volley of shotgun fire. Sulfur swept through the hub and flooded my nostrils, scalding my lungs, pitching me into a violent coughing fit. I flew back up the air vent just in time to dodge a second burst, two feet from where I'd been standing. Didn't sound or smell like grenades.

Some horrible thing below hissed and screeched in a way I can't even begin to describe. The adrenaline floodgates burst open. I crawled faster than I thought physically possible. I crawled until my muscles sobbed and my conscious mind gave up. Fatigue washed over me and plunged my head into a barrel of ether.

Another nightmare brought me back, cold and trembling.

When my limbs built the courage to move again I doubled back to the residential block and staged a guerilla assault on another zombie patrol. With the enemy focused on that sector I had all the time in the world to creep back to Command Control and disembowel the security system. No more need for the vents — I'm a ghost now. Hopefully the same can be said for Berenger, and for Max. Hang in there just a little longer, baby.

I think I know where she's holed up. Seen just about everyplace else. And I'll be damned if I don't find out what the UAC has been experimenting with up here, or what the demons are doing up there in the Anomaly. I'm sneaking off to the security barracks to stock up on rations and grab a clean envirosuit. Then it's off to Phobos Labs. The databases in Central Processing should have plenty of answers for me.

11

God damn this rock.

I seen some bad shit since I arrived here, but I felt like it'd toughened me up. I felt like knowing Berenger and Max were alive fortified my morale. Guerilla assault on two more zombie patrols sent five more of the fuckers to hell and they gotta be running out of guys soon, right? Felt like a nice workout. A nice kicker-upper. Saw some bad shit, but now I can handle anything, right?

They've turned Phobos Labs into a feeding trough.

God damn this rock. God damn the Red Planet. The UAC. The Corps.

Berenger was right. I knew he was right the moment I rounded that corner. Worse than the dead. Worse than dogs.

It used to be a lounge where the S.O.'s could kick back on their breaks. Furnished just like the residential lobby, two couches on the right side, a wall-mounted TV on the left with its screen smashed. Maybe didn't normally house the stench of spilled bowels, or have filth staining the walls or piled in the corners like a cat's litter box.

Towards the back wall they hung, bound at their scabby, welted wrists. Only the arms, shoulders, and most of the head remained of the left-most, the skull hollowed and oozing. The middle, a single arm dangling, severed at the elbow and scarred with teeth-marks; the rest of him lay in the middle of the floor, quartered like a fried chicken. The right-most had no lower half, his entrails dangling and curled on the carpet below, head bowed with his eyes closed as if in prayer.

It was feeding time when I came by. Three things crouched around the remains of the middle victim, looking up at me with disinterest. I don't know what to call them besides things. Shit-brown, textured like charred bread and parading a bastardized human shape. A different one gnawed at the ribs of the right-most hanger, a giant British Bulldog standing on its hind legs, great gorilla arms instead of forepaws, skin raw and pink like an open wound.

No faces among them. Just teeth. Just jaws and teeth, chomping and slurping obscenely. Tiny specks for eyes, gleaming like dying stars. Animal eyes.

The bulldog finally noticed my scent, turned toward me and let out a Rottweiler snarl. My shotgun went off all on its own and popped the first brown thing's head like a zit. Pumped the empty casing out as the other two sprung up and pierced my eardrums with their screeches, their jaws open wide enough to swallow baseballs. Unloaded the next shot into the second one before he was on his feet. Caught the third in the back as he tried to run. I think his neck snapped when he hit the wall.

Bulldog kept advancing even after I'd sprayed its left lobe across the room. I stumbled backward pumping shell after shell until nothing remained of its face and it finally collapsed. I might've kept the motion going for a few clicks before bloodlust and panic subsided.

My throat's on fire. Lost count of how many times I've thrown up today. No matter how many times I do, my stomach festers. Almost forgot to reload.

After heaping the things' remains in the corner I took out my trusty kitchen knife and began to cut the men down, starting with the left-most. They all had Corps tattoos. Probably like my team, dumb kids on the reserves expecting a cozy job in space and a nice fat paycheck. It would destroy their mothers to see them like I found them. Figured the least I could do was lay them out proper, search the labs for a few sheets to cover them with.

The right-most victim had the most meat left on him, and probably the most weight, so I saved him for last. His face was intact, unlike the other two. He could still get an open casket funeral. I reached for his bindings, knife at the ready. Took a firm grip on his right wrist.

Been curled up in the air vents for a while, crying like a baby. I can't sleep anymore. Nobody could ever sleep again. Nobody could ever close their eyes again. I should take a screwdriver to my eyes and ears. Only way I'll ever escape it. His eyes opened. The second I touched him his eyes popped open and looked right at me. Bulging out of their sockets, filled with panic and anguish. He started screaming. He twisted and thrashed to get away from me, his intestines whipping like a beheaded snake. Endless falsetto screaming.

I drew my sidearm and ended it quick.

12

It's funny. A couple days ago I'd just about lost my mind over these demons prowling the halls of Phobos Labs. I've just finished reviewing my mission log and it gave me a good chuckle. And I'm steadily growing accustomed to the hellish décor.

I found more feeding areas; more strung-up bodies, a few crucified on the walls with industrial bolt drivers. And lots more of the shit-imps and the bulldogs. My kill count just breached a dozen, and I'm having a ball. I enjoy killing these things. Popping zombies has its kicks, but I really enjoy killing the demons. I enjoy their agonized howls. I relish the way they writhe and gurgle.

They die easy. Even the zombie marines, or whatever controls them, are sloppy and inexperienced. They know how to torture the helpless. They're not used to combat. They have no heads for strategy or organization. I found out the imps can somehow throw fire like percussion grenades, but they always aim at me and never ahead, and I've seen about half of them abandon their comrades at the first sign of trouble. They recruited the humans as their muscle, and maybe to seize a better understanding of the facility and its technology. Or maybe it's the other way around, and the demons are just pets. I give a shit. They're all going to die either way.

I'm in the infirmary now, catching my breath and taking advantage of the late Doctor Hollenshead's bourbon stash to help me recover from another crude funeral.

The place was a horror show when I found it, with bodies strewn carelessly on the floor. Five in total, skinned and partially dismembered, a couple chewed up real good like dog bones. One of the four beds was occupied by another victim, still twitching either in reflex or shock, lidless eyes bulging up at the ceiling. Mercy shots all around. It's become my standard procedure for any victims I find.

Something bumped the furthest bed and moved it a couple inches with a loud grating whine. A shuddering form sat curled up in the far corner of the room, leaning against the wall, weeping silently. I ordered him to identify himself.

The weeping paused, and he responded with my name in a quivering voice filled with disbelief. Rowlins's voice.

I lowered my weapon and rushed to his side. His chalk-pale skin was slick with sweat, his cheeks caked with dried blood. Someone took all his gear, save his envirosuit. Someone had also took his eyes.

He touched my face and wept openly, praising his lord and savior over and over.

"Walked right into their den," he stuttered. "They'd laid ambushes…Trague didn't see them coming. Seven or eight, maybe more. They poured out of the rooms and just…carried him off…We all panicked and separated…They weren't…They weren't men…They weren't human, they…"

Rowlins covered his face and took a few minutes to suppress an oncoming fit of wailing. His limbs trembled like those of an old man in his final moments.

"I'd nearly lost my faith," he went on. "Oh, Christ…!"

I told him it was okay, that he was safe with me. He didn't hear a thing I said.

"Oh, Christ…The things he made me see…He made me watch…He had the men tortured slowly, eaten alive piece by piece, the…the women flayed and violated…he made me watch, and then he took my eyes so I could see nothing but those sights forever…"

"Who's 'he'?" I said.

Rowlins suddenly went stiff and held his breath. He sat for a moment in silent, reverent terror before he spoke again.

"The one who showed me. He commands the creatures from the other side, just beyond the gateway…A great baron of Hell's hordes possessing terrible powers…His hands…He t-took me to Deimos…He showed me…"

Rowlins's voice built to the verge of screaming and his hands locked onto my shoulders.

"He showed me," he said again and again, as if I understood what he meant. "He showed me! He showed me!"

I tried to calm him down, but he still didn't hear. Finally he let go and fell against the wall, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around his face, rocking and wailing like a four-year-old boy. He was inconsolable for a long time, but he found some consolation knowing Berenger and Max had survived. He'd thought we'd all suffered the same fate as the others.

His headset was gone so he hadn't heard anything and didn't know where anyone was. He'd heard panicked screams a few hours ago and assumed they were Trague's. When I asked, he wouldn't tell me about Deimos or the gateway he'd mentioned. Just fell into another fit of shivering and prayer.

I'd lingered too long. Taking up my shotgun I stood again and told Rowlins it was time for me to move on, promising to return for him on the way back.

"Can you spare your sidearm?" he asked. "I got no ammo and if they f-find me…"

"You can't see to shoot," I said. "Stay invisible for just a little longer. We'll look after you, I promise."

He shook his head, begging me. "Please, I got no ammo."

The terror and desperation creeping into his voice filled me with a profound sense of pity. I knelt beside him, drew my sidearm and nursed it into his hand. His fingers tightened around the handle. His face twisted into an anguished grimace and he started crying again, stroking the pistol lovingly as if it were a kitten. He blessed me twice between his sobs.

Then he put the barrel in his mouth and squeezed the trigger.

I've covered him up on the furthest bed with his dog tags resting on his chest. If a rescue team ever comes, they'll be sure to find him.

Christ. That might not be for another week or more, going by the book. Assuming the admins knew something about this mess before they shipped us up here. What if my suspicions are wrong and Mars Base doesn't have a clue what's happened? What if they think we're still just having radio trouble? How long before they send another team to check on us then? Two weeks? A month?

I'm heading out now. Next stop, Central Processing. And who knows what else.

13

Inter-dimensional space travel. That's what they were playing with in the Anomalies over the past year. Teleportation.

Whatever they want to call it, they weren't telling UAC-Earth everything, only that they were throwing shit into one end and watching it pop out the other, sending random things back and forth between the two moons and giggling like children about it. I learned about it all from S.S.O. Hall's private files. Every record of every little thing that happens in the Anomaly is wired straight to the PC in his office. I managed to hack in by linking my PDA to the mainframe in Central Processing.

Both Anomalies house something called a "slipgate" which opens and closes artificially stabilized black holes at the flip of a lever. The project's original purpose was to find a new way to dispose of radioactive waste and other hazardous materials, until they discovered that if the slipgates use a matching frequency to create two black holes simultaneously, they conjoin to form a tunnel through space like the signal between two full-duplex radios. It was supposed to revolutionize space travel as we know it. Allow humankind to tear ass across the stars in the blink of an eye. They'd planned to launch slipgate satellites so next-gen scientists could make good use of them in other galaxies.

I guess passing through a subspace tear is like when you take a shortcut through a seedy alley to get to work early. Except what these guys found was beyond a fucking seedy alley.

They told the Mars Base admins that Janssen died in an accident while "assisting" with an experiment in Phobos Anomaly. They told UAC-Earth they'd been having minor technical difficulties, but everything was peachy otherwise. They lied to everyone, especially to us. They lied about sending Janssen through the teleporter. They probably would've lied about Carlyle if they'd known his side-effect would be delayed.

Among the records were digital video archives, but most of them showed the same shit. Powering up the slipgate's capacitors, setting the frequency, energizing the core, creating the hole, tossing in a crate full of beef jerky, chatting on the phone with Deimos Base for six hours and taking notes. The process of opening the space tunnel was incredible — the slipgate creates a small star and collapses it in less than a second — but even that got boring after seeing it a hundred times.

I opened a video file dated around the time Janssen went up to Phobos and didn't come back. They had him suited up with his helmet secured, standing at the foot of the platform steps, looking pretty pumped about the whole thing. Probably hopping on something. I'd be high, too, I guess.

Once the machine opened its swirling black maw, he wouldn't move. His legs went stiff and he gave the camera this funny look like he was having second thoughts. That is, if he had a choice in the matter. Maybe he was begging the S.O.'s not to make him step through it. Maybe they promised him something, like a million bucks or getting his big brother out of prison. After a bit of encouragement from the nearby engineers he climbed the steps and stopped a mere foot away from the gateway, its misty tendrils coiling around him and caressing his envirosuit like a hungry lover. Then it swallowed him.

He came out the other end screaming and clawed his eyes out. He died of shock in the infirmary a few minutes later.

After the shooting spree that resulted from Carlyle's trip through the hole, the eggheads on Phobos and Deimos finally decided there was something terribly wrong with their newfound galactic shortcut. The Deimos guys modified one of their security bots and sent it through to Phobos, hoping to document everything it saw during the trip. The video came out all scrambled to hell, and even with a team of techies on it round the clock they couldn't make it any clearer. I watched it a little while ago. Looks an awful lot like the red static I saw in Command Control and a number of the TV's in Phobos Labs, but — and the eggheads were equally puzzled by this — despite the portals' instantaneous transporting effect, the video is clocked at over three hours.

Well, funny things started happening after that experiment, some which I consider awfully terrifying. Apparently Berenger did, too — enough that he saw fit to leave them out of our briefing.

According to Hall's email correspondence with Deimos's chief eggheads, technical problems swarmed Phobos's brother base two days after the probe went through the gateways. Electronics went on the fritz all over the installation, mostly insignificant crap like monitors frizzing out, radio transmissions cutting off abruptly, and lights flickering for no reason. One email made mention of odd red lines on the televisions that chilled my blood.

The malfunctions reached the Anomaly and got worse. I found a radio transmission from a shaken Deimos security officer who claimed something had come out of the gateway. He wouldn't say what. The slipgate had activated itself and something came out, grabbed one of the engineers and dragged him through the portal. They'd pulled the plug and sealed off Deimos Anomaly, but heard all sorts of activity going on in there for the next twelve hours — footsteps, banging, whispering. Eventually all was quiet, and they unsealed the lab to find everything exactly as they'd left it. After that, Deimos didn't send out any messages for a while, so everyone figured things were back to normal.

One morning Phobos called Deimos to arrange the next probe experiment and nobody picked up. They weren't even getting a return signal, like Deimos's radio was off the hook. That's when they got the call from UAC-Mars. They couldn't get through to Deimos, either: the entire moon had vanished from the sky.

So Hall got nervous and requested additional padding for his security department until UAC-Phobos could figure out what exactly happened to its brother. The admins complied. So did Mars Patrol. And Berenger.

Goddamn radio problems, he said.

Two important things have happened today. First, the realization that I'm operating on a time limit without a watch. When the clock reaches zero, the slipgate will swallow Phobos whole. And if there's any truth in what Rowlins told me, I don't want to be around when it happens.

The second important thing occurred right after the first, when someone pressed a pistol to the back of my head. I pivoted and locked my arms around my attacker's wrists, pointing the pistol to the floor. In one motion I could've wrapped my left arm around the asshole's neck and snapped it before the first round fired.

I found myself face-to-face with a pale and filthy Maxine Barrett, dried tears clinging to her cheeks, blood spattered on her face and neck. Her eyes were bloodshot and gleaming wet. And blank. Nobody was home.

I said her name.

Something clicked inside her head. She recognized me, and the color slowly returned to her face. Her hand surrendered the pistol. She wrapped her arms around my neck and started bawling.

The mainframe's chamber has become our safe zone for the time being. I've boosted the security clearance level for every door in the base so they'll only open with the S.S.O.'s access card (I found it on his corpse). Now the only way to get within ten feet of us is through a plethora of thick, magnetically sealed doors that the enemy can't open. They'll only find me when I let them from now on.

Max hadn't eaten anything all day. I offered her two nutri-bars, and she snatched them out of my hand, nearly ate them wrapper and all. It helped calm her down, but she still couldn't find the strength to speak, so I let her rest while my PDA downloaded everything on the Anomalies it could fit in its belly. I can always sift through it on the trip home.

She's curled up next to me with her head on my shoulder, sawing logs while I type. It'll be another hour before the download is complete. I hope we still have time to make it to the shuttle.

14

Tried to get some sleep before we headed out, but that same dream came to shake me out of it. When I woke, it took my brain a few minutes to register Berenger's voice on the radio.

I reported the security system as disabled and Max as shaken but intact, and agreed that the three of us would rendezvous at the nuclear plant's entrance. I assumed our next destination would be the hangar, where the Mars shuttle sat waiting, but I said nothing of this for fear that the demons would hear and instantly converge on us (edit: in hindsight they probably know, because where else would we go?). As with Max, I recommended Berenger ditch his headset when he signed off.

Max was still huddled in the corner where she'd been sleeping. Her limbs had turned to wood, and when I offered my hand to help her to her feet she scooted away, staring up at me with the trembling eyes of a toddler lost in the dark. Her face was marble gray — the mere suggestion of leaving our haven, of returning to those black halls of snarling death, petrified her.

"I saw…" she said, and trailed off, never breaking eye contact.

I assured her everything would be fine. She refused to budge, even when I grabbed her arm and tried to drag her with me.

"Max, we gotta go."

"I saw," she repeated like a broken record. "I saw it appear…outta nowhere. A red cloud. Then it burst into flames and…this horrible, smiling face… It swam through the air like a shark with a tail of fire. He never saw it coming. It snuck up behind him and…"

Max paused a minute and seemed ready to heave. She finally looked away and regained her composure, staring blankly at the wall.

"Max," I said, "we gotta get movin' before they figure out a way to get to us!"

"It dove in," she went on. "Dove into him like a swimmer into water. Like it wasn't solid at all. It dove into his soul. His eyes b-burst and spurted…He grabbed his head, held it like he was trying to crush it in his hands. Trying to make it stop…He collapsed and started seizing and I ran…I ran…I abandoned him…"

After another long pause her eyes met mine again. And they weren't the eyes of a child. For a brief moment, she was Mad Max again. Cool, collected.

"We can't meet with Captain," she said flatly. "I watched him die."

I slid to my knees and sat in cold silence for several minutes. The devil voices played over and over in my memory. Voices that hadn't made a peep in a long time. Voices that used to belong to Kinney and McGee and the rest of my team. Has Berenger been one of them all along?

Max didn't talk anymore, just sat huddled against the wall, watching me. Reverted to her tattered state.

Our plan has changed. According to my map, Command Control has a maintenance airlock in the west block, same side of the installation as the nuclear plant. We can secure helmets and moonwalk to the hangar in safety. Max is still shaken up, but I imagine once she's in that cockpit she'll be her old self again (at least long enough to get us the fuck out of here).

We made a pit stop at one of the demons' makeshift storage caches. No spare ammo, but we found plenty of food and water, and a medic's satchel. It'll take us about an hour to reach the airlock, but after that we're home free.

15

Our progress has been slower than I'd hoped. It's been an hour and a half and we haven't made it to the airlock yet. We only just reached Command Control a few minutes ago.

To make sure nothing tails us I've had to reseal every junction door we pass through, but what's been slowing us up is the moment of tension that fills our limbs with concrete every time I break out that security card. Locking down the base trapped some of Hell's finest in certain hallways. We're stupid with terror wondering what'll be behind the next door.

Thoughts keep running through my head of the old Japanese game show reruns I watched as a kid, where the contestant frantically navigated a giant maze of doors in search of the exit. The maze was inhabited by a bunch of guys hunting the contestant. Neither party knew the location of the other until they came face-to-face. Capture meant getting tossed out of the maze into a pool of thick mud. They didn't string up the losers and snack on their live flesh.

We approached the next door in the usual way. Took positions on either side of the doorway with our eyes locked together, holding our breath 'til our lungs felt like bursting. Struggled for several minutes to bring my hand all the way up to the card-swiper.

A beep and a loud metallic click. Max swallowed. The door whisked open and we presented arms.

Five confused and pissed bulldogs stampeded like a gnawing, drooling flesh-train. Shock stunted our reflexes and we didn't even open fire until the first one had already crossed the threshold. If they hadn't been stupid enough to trip over each others' corpses we'd have been chewed to pieces. The last one plowed into me as it died and collapsed on my leg, nearly fractured the bone.

Max checked me out and found nothing serious beyond a few bruises. She kept surprisingly cool despite the state I found her in.

My suit smells like shit again.

We stopped at the next relatively clean junction for rest and rations. Neither of us is hungry, though.

16

He's watching us. Somehow he's watching without the cameras. And I know it's him for sure because I can feel his presence by some god-awful means, call it psychic or spiritual or whatever. Somehow he can reach out and touch your soul, and your insides feel so tainted you can't move.

I'd barely raised my access card to the swiper when I shuddered and dropped it on the floor: the ice spiders had come back to march goosebump trails across my skin and crystallize my blood until my muscles froze with it. Max stood in place and didn't breathe. I couldn't turn my head to look at her, so I didn't know if she felt the same horrible presence or if she was just watching me in terror and confusion. The image on that security monitor swarmed my memory — eyes of fire in a goat's sneer.

The swiper suddenly beeped all on its own. Electronic locks disengaged on either end of the corridor with heavy clicks, then both doors vanished into the ceiling with an agonized whine. Two more locks released and another pair of doors vanished, then two beyond that, then two beyond that, each set vanishing in rapid succession. In a few moments it was over — the hallway yawned both ways like the throat of a great worm, and somewhere far behind us its stomach growled.

Max swallowed hard and pressed herself into the corner like she could squeeze through it and hide inside the wall. She stared with bulging, tearful eyes down the corridor behind me, but when I whirled around I found it deserted. Nothing was following us. Nothing that I could see.

I grabbed her wrist and started running. Christ they sounded so close. We never found out just how close because we never stopped or looked back.

Lost track of the time. Been hiding in this office too long. Whatever was following us — if anything ever was following us — we lost it. But now we don't know where we are. The map is twisted somehow. Every time I refer to it the hallways look different. It leads us in circles. In the last ten minutes we came to six dead-ends.

Jesus, I think we might've doubled back. I can't tell. All these goddamn hallways look the same.

17

We never made it to that airlock. We came close. Right when I knew it was just around the next corner we were cutting through a small employee lounge with a window view of the nuclear plant a quarter of a mile away.

We weren't halfway through the room. The whole base suddenly shook in place, swept my feet right out from under me. A bright flash in the same instant, then the window warped and imploded. Everything in the room that wasn't bolted down got sucked out into space.

I managed to slap my helmet down moments before I was sucked out. Max must've had a firm grip on something because I came out alone.

The gravity on Phobos is almost zilch. Explosive decompression launched a couch clear of the moon's surface; if I hadn't had the grappling gun I would've followed, and almost did anyway thanks to a brief panic attack that turned my fingers to pudding. I stopped with a nasty jerk that nearly broke me in two.

After what felt like an hour of struggling I reeled myself onto one of the maintenance platforms lining Command Control's western wall, but was barely on my feet again when buckshot pellets whizzed past my head from the roof of the nuclear plant a hundred meters away - too far for any sort of accuracy. I didn't actually see the shooters until thirty seconds of frantic scrambling later, when I reached the CC roof and spotted three Mars Patrol officers, helmets down, jogging across the catwalk between the two sectors. They all had shotguns. I had nothing and was sitting out in the open like a chump, the nearest cover fifty yards away: the Command Control antenna platform, a garden of nodes and power boxes the size of small cars.

Pistol fire erupted from the hole that had spat me into space, courtesy of Mad Max: one gunman's head exploded in a cloud of blood, brains, and helmet fragments. The other two hit the deck, firing wildly back at her and hitting nothing but the side of the base. It was the break I needed to run my ass off and take a defensible position amidst the junk on the roof's antenna platform. I'd lost my guns during my short flight, but I've had enough practice getting the drop on these guys.

They didn't even hear me. I waited until the first one passed, then leapt out and locked one arm around the second zombie's head, grabbed his shotgun with my other hand and wrenched it out of his grip. The first zombie had no idea what was going on and took a silent zero-gravity shotgun blast to the back, nearly tore him clean in two.

An elbow slammed into my solar plexus and crushed the wind out of me. The second zombie was stronger than I expected: he slammed me against the side of the platform again and again, wrenching my arm to get his weapon back, nearly snapping it clean off at the elbow. Somehow I got free and drove that hard wooden stock into his face so hard his visor cracked and his helmet disengaged, revealing green demon-eyes burning in a furious Aryan face that once belonged to Captain Berenger.

The zombies aren't as dead as I thought. They still need to breathe. Berenger's specter opened his mouth to scream and a cloud of blood bubbles flooded out instead. His legs buckled and he started gasping like a fish out of water. Didn't watch for very long before I chambered the next round and indulged myself.

Took a few minutes to catch my breath and spotted another figure fifty meters out, approaching cautiously with pistol at the ready. I could tell it was Max because it didn't move in that peculiar way the zombies do. When she saw I was still in one piece she clung to me like a koala bear and even smiled a little. Almost needed a crowbar to pry her off. I'm beginning to hope she keeps it up once we're back on Earth.

Berenger had an impressive cache piled on the nuclear plant's roof: UAC rangefinder, empty RPG-7 and two spare rockets, half-dozen C4 charges complete with radio detonator, and two cases of 12-gauge ammunition. Motherfucker had been tracking our movements through the base's windows, probably with a little help from his goat-faced commander. We've relocated the hoard to the antenna platform. Hopefully the zombie patrols won't get any more use out of it, that launcher in particular.

I downloaded the contents of Berenger's PDA before I disposed of the bodies. He'd been recording an audio log of our radio chatter since our arrival. Might be useful when we return to Mars Base.

Neither of us have felt the presence since we came outside, like it has no influence beyond Phobos Base's hull. Must be why Max has improved so much: she's beginning to smile like she used to, and she's getting talkative again. We've been discussing what we'll do when we get back, whether the UAC will reward us with cash in exchange for keeping our mouths shut, and whether we'd have time for a quickie in the shuttle on the way home.

excerpt from audio log

MAX: I could go for a shower right now.

SARGE: Sounds good. Been awhile since I had someone scrub my back.

MAX: Last fourth of July.

SARGE: Really? That long?

MAX: Yep. You were drunk.

SARGE: Oh don't even. You were drunk off your ass before you even got to my door.

MAX: I wasn't that drunk. I only had a few-

SARGE: You thought my closet was the john. Nearly pissed in my boots.

I'm finding it easier to breathe, myself. Whatever these monsters are, they've tainted the technology by existing here. And whatever their origin, they must also need air to breathe because not one of them followed us outside. We're completely free out here. We could camp on the roof if we had to. Got plenty of air.

The floaters seem closer than they did yesterday.

18

I don't think I believe in God anymore. I mean, my experiences here on Phobos already ensured that, but until now I might've reconsidered at some point. This measly little hike has turned into a fucking disaster.

We're never getting back. It dawned on us when we saw the shuttle, or what was left of it.

The scene slowly came into view after an hour's walk across the base, and somehow even before we got close enough to see the landing pad a cold dread began to wash over us — the sinking feeling that any promise of escape was too good to be true, like what most folks in Hell must feel like on a slow day moments before an extra-big pitchfork spears them in the ass.

The shuttle was torn inside-out. The hull split wide open in the shape of a blackened flower well in bloom. Everything else — dashboard controls, engine parts, those damned uncomfortable seats — lay scattered across the landing pad like burnt rice thrown at a wedding. C4 charges, or maybe a well-placed rocket.

We both broke down when we saw it, collapsing in each other's arms. We sat there for a long time, saying nothing. Nothing to say out loud that wasn't already blaring loud and clear in both our heads. At the far end of the crater, Phobos Anomaly sat, mocking us.

"I don't wanna die here," Max said.

She doesn't know about what happened to Deimos; what may soon happen to us. I don't have the heart to tell her.

Now I'm back in the hangar, this time with company. I sealed off the launch control room from the rest of the facility (here's hoping the door stays shut) and promoted the control tower to our base of operations. Max and I have been going over Phobos Base's blueprints for the last few hours, trying to find a way to get word of this catastrophe to Mars. I've had a few ideas brewing in my head, so we aren't throwing in the towel just yet.

Max is beginning to worry me, though. She's gone into a relapse and suffers from daymares: she'll be near-comatose one minute, then suddenly jump with a gasp or stare in terror at things I can't see, and I'm finding it more and more difficult to bring her out of it. I've already had to slap her wits back into place once or twice. When I look at her I can see her physically teetering on the edge of a total breakdown. She's too restless to sleep and her hope is all but gone. I want to believe she'll make it through this all right.

I want to believe I'll make it through this all right. I have to believe there's still a chance. Command Control's radio is dead, but its wires and antennae are still in one piece. I have to believe I can contact Mars Base. I can't lose my head now. I have to believe.

19

One of my ideas is a sure winner! We build a portable radio, jack it into Command Control's systems and use the long-distance frequency to call for help. I can install the thing directly onto the antenna platform, which means the whole job can be done from the rooftop, totally clear of the hostiles infesting the facility.

Max refuses to leave the tower, so she's sitting this operation out once our radio is completed. I'd rather we stick together, but she feels safe in the tower and I don't know what to do with her anymore. I think she'll be fine, though. Mars Base should be hearing from us pretty soon.

20

ggod hel mw plese here' no wa out th's no w therc 't gout I cnn n ou gosd god god hheslp imlosin iom imlosin im losing my mmm ,m

hs hans his hands his h

21

no way out. god please help me. please help me. there no way out. i cantg et out. i cant get out.

god there sno way out. im trapped. i cant get out. theyre verywhere. theyre inside outside. what are they god. what are they the things outside. look so much like rocks just like rocks floating but they have eyes god and teeth. so many teeth. why do wanto eat me god.

god please answer me im so alone. shes gone. cam eback inside and he was there smiling at me smiling that goat face. his hands god. hs hands were burning. she sat at his feet like a dog an ate a dead man. she ate his dead flesh and stared at me with crazy eyes. she was his the whole time, lied to me about berenger, kept us separated so they could kill us easier. so they could get the shuttle. it was too much god. i shot her. i was dizzy fainting and i only had time to kill one and the devil was right there smiling and i shot my friend instead. i was angry. please forgive me god I was so angry. im so alone. im losing my mind. i don wabt los my mind.

his hands make me see things god. he showed me. he showed me.

im scared god. please answer me.

22

Saw it again. Same dream inside the realm of blood. There's no horizon there. The whole realm is a sphere of molten chaos and the landscape lines the inner-wall of the sphere. The ground is fleshy and raw, and boiling rivers of blood and magma flow endlessly in every direction. Dead twisted trees and spikes of black rock thrust obscenely upward out of the fleshy ground and make it bleed. Rock formations float in the air like space debris, but never drift, some the size of Mt. Everest, some no bigger than basketballs. Rock spires tower overhead with demonic castles at their peaks built from infernal red bricks and bile green marble. Thick red mist swirling in the sphere's belly almost gives the impression of a sky except I see more spires and buildings piercing through from the other hemisphere. Some spires are so tall that the castles on top meet at the center with their roofs inches from locking with each other.

Dream so vivid it frightens me. I smell things in it. Sulfur and charcoal. I taste flesh and sweat in the air. I hear the disembodied whispers of broken human beings.

Something carries me to a great roofless temple atop a mountain of human skulls. Incredible sight I can hardly describe. Great green pillars a mile high. Scores of humanoid things amassed in the great hall. A hundred form a circle at the center, half of them man-goat gods. Titan creatures, the smallest standing ten feet tall. The rest, bulldogs and shit-imps, keep at a distance out of fear and reverence, many clinging to the walls and pillars to watch. I stand among them, so close I can smell and feel them, but I don't move or make a sound because I'm terrified they'll notice me.

The demigods snarl and argue like in a senate hearing, passing a large skull back and forth to designate the speaker, but often snatching it from one another like children or speaking out of turn. I don't understand them. It's all animal sounds, grunts and howls and hisses. Whatever the discussion is, they can't seem to agree.

One of the goat-gods bellows long and loud, silences the lot and frightens off some of the spectators. He has the floor, but not the skull. The goat-god who does shakes it at him angrily. They exchange snarls and brays. The first grabs the second's throat, digs his claws through his jaw. The head comes clean off with a crackle and pop. He presents the trophy to the spectators with a victorious howl as it burns in his hands. He's got the skull now, doesn't he?

I recognize the infernal eyes. He's the Devil of Phobos. The Great Hell Baron.

He sneers and holds another object. Sleek, metallic, alien to that realm of flesh and stone and fire. The other creatures are curious and amazed. They've never seen anything like it before.

The Baron brays and bellows like a drill instructor, his eyes flaring into green starbursts. When he finishes, he tosses the object on the floor at the center of the ring, and the congregation erupts into another argument. I expect more heads to roll, but the bloody goat-god stands tall and proud, monolith-like, and never speaks again. Thousands of demon voices fill my ears until my skull begins to crack. The sea of writhing, clawing bodies covering the temple walls sends tremors across my skin. For a moment I can't tell if it's a dream or not.

I'm torn away from this "civilized" scene and subjected to countless others so vile and soul-curdling that I wake up screaming. I never remember any of them. I refuse to.

The barrel goes in my mouth but I can't squeeze the trigger. Something stops me.

23

I don't know how many days since I last touched this PDA. I don't remember writing some of these entries, and that disturbs me a little bit. I lost my head for a while, but the therapeutic effects of keeping this mission log helped me find it again. Now it's time I drained the abscess.

At least the previous entries give me an excuse to skip certain events. Forcing most of this out through trembling hands, disjointed memory, and a half-dozen beers, so bear with me. A lot of it is jumbled, buried in the darkness by some merciful defense mechanism.

Also understand that I loved Max with all my heart. She was the only real friend I had on Mars. Better she died at my hands than at theirs. Although maybe they already killed her. She could never have escaped Phobos. Even if she'd made it back to Earth, she would still be trapped here. If that makes any sense.

I don't know how long I was blacked out, but the nightmare described in the last entry tormented me a number of times. I must've screamed a lot in my sleep so I have no idea how I was still alive.

A thick, rotten stench choked me to waking. My arms were extended over my head and my wrists hurt. My envirosuit was gone. There was no floor beneath my feet.

I didn't want to open my eyes. They did it all on their own.

Jesus. Jesus, hanging

I was surrounded. Twenty of them. Just like the feeding area, wrists bound, guts spilled, heads bowed as if in prayer. A meat locker. Used to be an office. Blood spattered and flecked on the walls. No furniture save a small table near the door, bloody chainsaw resting on top.

I screamed and I wept.

Beyond the door dogs began to howl. One of them was close. Panic swept over me. My bindings were hung on a hook in the ceiling. I grabbed the hook and tried to pull myself high enough to slip them off.

An ugly pink snout poked through the open doorway and sniffed the foul air. I froze.

The bulldog lumbered in, dribbling on the floor, sniffing in my direction. It was looking right at me. It let out a low growl like an ancient motorboat and rushed forward with its jaws hanging open wide, batting the other meat aside with its huge head. When it got close I drove my right foot into its face and knocked it off its feet. Stunned it long enough for me to climb to the ceiling and free myself, but I landed right next to the thing when I came back down. It nearly took my hand off.

We both stood at the same time, and it charged again. It was stupid, thank god. I sidestepped and sent the bastard headfirst into the wall as I ran for the door. By the time it recovered I had the chainsaw in my hand, alive and growling.

We must've been at it an hour, an ultra-violent matador show, both of us slipping on the bloody floor and stumbling into the hanging bodies. It was too stupid to feel pain, attacking no matter how bad I shredded it. Too stupid to learn not to charge me. Blood loss and head injuries finally did it in, and I was sure every demon in Phobos Base had heard us.

I may have blacked out again for a while.

No one came to check on me, and I didn't want to wait for more bulldogs to sniff me out. Had time to saw the fucker's head off for good measure, though.

It occurred to me that the Hell Baron's sour presence was strangely absent from the base, which could only mean that he was preoccupied somewhere in his own realm. He couldn't have known I was free.

They'd dragged me back to Phobos Labs, the heart of the demon infestation. Now I was alone and unarmed amidst a small army of torture-obsessed psychopaths. They were crawling all over the labs, like the Hell Baron had called reinforcements to keep things in order. I was grateful that most of the lights were out. For the better part of a day I kept to the shadows, moved swiftly and silently through the hallways, hugged the darkness or balled up behind a crate when a zombie patrol or scavenging technician lumbered past, brushing so close it's a miracle they didn't hear my heart pounding. All they had to do was glance in my direction at the wrong moment, or pause in mid-stride long enough to feel my breath on their necks, and it would all be over. I would drown in a sea of teeth and nails.

I was nearly caught when I rounded the corner and almost stumbled over a shit-imp sitting in the middle of the next corridor. It hunched over a stinking pile of giblets that used to be a human being, munching contentedly on a fistful of meat. I crept right up behind it, and just when it seemed to pick up my scent I threw my arms around its head and snapped its neck. Dragged the corpse into the shadows behind a nearby cluster of leaky barrels and waited for another patrol to pass before moving on.

I checked three or four of the demons' makeshift storerooms and eventually found an ammo cache. By a stroke of luck it had my confiscated envirosuit and my PDA. It was here that I curled up behind a stack of empty crates and started crying.

I hid for a long time, losing my mind, listening to the snarls and devil-speak in the halls outside. Must've written those log entries then. I don't remember a lot of that period beyond sobbing, hoping no one found me, and wanting to murder every living thing on Phobos.

I remember the third one eventually overpowering the first two. My civilized human mind stepped out of the room and quietly closed the door behind him. I suited up, grabbed a satchel, loaded up with all the guns and ammo I could carry, and began a swift, merciless combat sweep of the labs, starting with a zombie marine I casually shot as he strolled into the storeroom. He carried a boxed M397 gatling gun ammo belt.

It's coming back only in bits and pieces. Seemed like they hadn't expected it. Most of them didn't get a shot off. Lots of the shit-imps ran, but none of them got away this time. I flushed those fucking labs out. Every single piece of vermin, human-looking or otherwise. Chased to exhaustion, driven into the corner, executed. Hunted and exterminated.

Except in the Anomaly. Childish terror halted me every time I tried to step toward the elevator. I knew what would happen when I saw the sonofabitch again. The dizziness, the flesh-tingling horror of standing in his presence. He'd overpower me again, disembowel me on the spot.

Motherfucker had to die. Everything good and right in the cosmos demanded it; sang it in my ears.

In one of the ammo storerooms I found the M397 gatling gun sitting on top of a pile of mining equipment, accompanied by an angelic choir that rang in my ears. With the cannon strapped onto my back and a satchel of C4 at my hip, I stepped back outside and took a quarter-hour hike to the Anomaly.

The floaters were still there, fifty of them flying directly over Phobos Anomaly in hungry buzzard circles. Many still drifted idly like before, some several hundred feet away, some within rock-throwing distance, a hundred or more scattered across the sky along the length of the base. All were entranced and oblivious to the world around them like monks in a monastery. Living limpet mines waiting for something to disturb them. My stomach trembled and twitched, and as my eyes locked onto one sleeping only thirty feet to my left I started to remember what fear was.

It turned and gazed at me with a single, searing green eye. A short burst from the cannon spattered the monster like a rotten tomato, its remains descending slowly to the bottom of the crater. So far the rest hadn't noticed me. Thankfully sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.

My satchel had twelve C4 charges, a cluster potent enough to punch a small crater in the moon's surface. I rigged them all to a custom palm-sized detonator and placed them on the weakest points along the Anomaly's hull. Sweat stung my eyes as I watched the circle of floaters overhead swirl aimlessly in a grotesque spiral. My prayers came in hoarse whispers. Worked as quickly as I could. Needed two hands to carry the cannon and had to put it down to place each charge.

One floater must've noticed. Came up from behind, and if I hadn't glanced up when I did it would've bitten my head off. I panicked and tumbled, drew my sidearm and put a single bullet right in the thing's eye, sent it swerving wildly away like a drunken bee. I placed the last charge and hightailed it back inside before the rest of the floaters got curious. They didn't try to follow this time.

Beauty is hard to achieve in a firearm, but that cannon was it. Caress the trigger and it screams like a hundred jackhammers and everything in front of it ceases to exist. Thirty-odd zombie technicians cut to ribbons in less than a minute. Christ I never saw such carnage. Their blood vaporized in the air. Nothing left of the targets but perforated scraps. A few targets cleaved clean in two. Spit ran down the corners of my mouth as I marched down that long hallway and finished off the rest in Phobos Anomaly's lab.

Not a single one panicked or even noticed me. They fell to pieces like fashion shop mannequins, too immersed in their work to realize they were dying. Big enough job to expend the cannon's reserve by the time I finished, so I chucked it and used my sidearm to put the few twitching survivors to bed.

I was right about one thing: they understood the technology. Understood enough to add certain modifications to the slipgate, though I'll be damned if I could tell what modifications at a glance. Maybe that was how they swallowed Deimos and all the fresh victims inhabiting it. Whatever they were doing, they'd almost finished when I came in and put an end to their little project.

The ice spiders swarmed over my flesh again, and they were taking no prisoners. Frigid pain shot through my entire body and forced a strangled scream out of my gut.

He burst through the portal faster than I expected, before I'd secured my grappling wire to the nearest safety rail. His eyes found me and stared deep into my soul, burning red like naval flares. His demonic stigmata blazed with such intensity the white flames on his hands swept up to his elbows. Black smoke puffed from his nostrils. He let out an enraged howl and stampeded toward me. His claws were inches from my eyes when I found my detonator. I prayed with all my heart that he needed air to breathe and hit the switch.

I went deaf for a moment as the entire base shook in its foundation, throwing the Hell Baron off-balance. Blinding white poured into the room.

The roof vanished. Everything in Phobos Anomaly — tools, crates, corpses — rained into the sky toward that great bloodshot eyeball above. My feet left the ground, but only for a minute. Magnetic boots and grappling line kept me safely anchored. Behind me the lab's giant door went into emergency lockdown and sealed itself shut.

At the last instant the Hell Baron had dug his claws and hooves into the metal of the floor instead of my face: he knelt as if in furious prayer, holding on for dear life. I planted my boot in his ugly face again and again, but he didn't let go no matter how badly I bloodied him. A full minute following the blast, the storm finally died as the last traces of oxygen fled the room.

The devil stood slowly upright again, but the flames in his bleeding hands had gone out. I watched as his raw pink skin flushed a bruised red and swelled to almost twice its mass, his face wincing and contorting like it couldn't decide between unbridled rage and staggering pain.

He took a single agonized step toward me, parted his teeth to unleash another howl, and a cloud of liquid red flooded from his mouth and nostrils as the vacuum of space tore his lungs inside-out. Those mighty cloven legs failed him. He slumped to the floor, heaving and gasping. His claws kept reaching hopelessly for me, wishing they could lock around my throat and take me to Hell with them. Got you, motherfucker. I got you. That soul-tainting presence left Phobos with the goat-god's final strangled gasp.

The abyss still yawned on the slipgate platform, its misty claws pawing weakly at the empty air as if feeling for its fallen master. A flick of the power switch and the void swallowed itself with an anguished moan. I stood in the dead silence of space, staring blankly at the machine for a long time. Wanted to see if it would kick on again by itself. Never did.

I realized how badly I wanted a drink and moon-walked back to the airlock doors. Disposed of the few leftovers roaming the other sectors along the way to the bar.

It's quiet here now. I'm alone on Phobos, wading knee deep in the dead and slipping slowly into madness. Six months of food and water to live off of while waiting for Mars Base to get curious and send a shuttle. Figured I won't be much good to them if I'm crazy by the time it gets here. Good to release all my crazy in a harmless, written form like this one.

But I won't be truly safe until that teleporter has been blown to scrap. I'm going to find more C4 charges later, to finish the job. Got a few other matters I want to take care of first.

Never did use that radio. Got attacked by the floaters while installing it. Been no sign of them since I sealed the gateway, so I think it's safe to go out again, but I'm still a little apprehensive. All in good time.

God I'm tired.

24

I "buried" Max today nex to Rowlins andt he others. Lined them up in the infirmary, those I could fin. No sign of Trague or Petro. Be gettin gdrunk for them all tonight, bodies r no bodies.

Couldn get through to Mars Base asgfter all so I'm cleaning out th liqer stock in the res sector while I wait from to call. Fuckin base is seems more cramped than usal. Halls so nrrrow.

Rest in piece, marines. Good bncha fellas, all of em. Crazy to get t space. Nobody sent up here to disappear.

To be forgot about.

25

Goddamn nightmares again. I wish they'd go away. That same awful realm. That same scene in the great temple with the meeting and the skull.

But it ends different. My wrists are bound and when the meeting is over I'm carried through room after room of an infernal mental hospital filled with maimed, broken shells of people.

Max is there, huddled in the corner, crying like a little girl. She looks up at me and says something in a language I can't understand. Her face is distorted like it's made of wet clay and her eyes are missing.

They hang me in a locker with twenty other bodies just like in the labs. It's silent for a long time. Then they all look at me at once and start screaming and wailing and wriggling like worms on hooks.

I can't sleep anymore. The pills don't work.

It's always that same nightmare in that same realm whose name I think I know but don't dare speak. It's the same meeting between the demon barons. That same metal object that shocked them all into silence, but isn't alien to me anymore. The Devil of Phobos was holding a UAC employee's PDA.

I can't stay here. How long do I have to stay here before they send someone? They must know something's wrong by now.

26

I can't write my hands shaken so bad. I know what they want Not the people I thought it was about the people, the souls. It was the technology They wanted the technology to study, not people to torture. The gateway, it was all about the gateway. Confined to that damned sphere for eons where they belonged a place never meant to be found The UAC goddamn them, they gave them a way to travel. They gave them gateways and starsships and weapons and cybernetics They gave them Deimos base. They gave them Deimos's gateway. I blow Phobos gateway and they still have a spare They don't need two. Theyll escape and theyl be more horrible than anyone can fathom

I can' write I can't see through th tears I'm never going back home. I'm never going to see Earth. Doesn't matter. Mor important things but I'm too scared Dreams showed me but being there will be different I don't thin I'll survive but I have to try I have to. No one else can go I hav to destroy both now. I hav to destroy both or theres no point. Set everythin to blow few minutes after I cross. Never open again This log make sure they'll never build again jesus chris I don't wan tto go

Nothing else matters. Maybe find a way back. Maybe.

###

 ** **From:****

 ** **To: UAC-Mars****

 ** **Subject: Digested your report****

Excellent work, first and foremost. Glad to see your people handled this situation so swiftly. I'm glad I listened to you when you suggested doubling the staff on Mars Base.

It's an atrocity is all I can say. I don't understand it. Adrian couldn't stomach the photographs, and he's seen some weird stuff in his day. Not much in those audio logs apart from people screaming and other racket. Sounds like that whole Mars Patrol team got hopped up on something nasty and went on a Charles Manson murder spree, but we haven't ruled out the possibility of terrorist insurgents, like that incident at UAC-Europe ten years ago. Send me the autopsy reports as soon as you get them. And keep quiet about those mutant remains until we learn what they're all about. Side-effects of the teleportation process? God I hope not.

We haven't sifted through all the data on this PDA yet. Some of our people think this space marine was a paranoid schizophrenic, but I'm still waiting for his psych profile to come in. Take a Mars buggy up there on your next trip and scout the rest of the moon's surface. Maybe he went for a moonwalk and never came back.

God knows what happened to Deimos. Our astronomers can't find any trace of it. Must have been flung clear of the gravitational pull. We're sending the shuttles tomorrow morning. Deimos Base has enough food and water to last the rest of the year, so the employees should be fine, but the sooner they're rescued the better. I'm sorry to hear the Phobos slipgate was lost. We still have high hopes for the project down here on Earth. Hopefully Deimos Anomaly is still intact.

Our techies couldn't fix the corrupted probe video, but they're bright boys and I'm sure they'll figure something out. We'll keep your people informed of any developments. Thanks again for all your efforts.

\- Romero

P.S.: Can you send me a list of UAC-Phobos's virus definitions when you find the time? Since we ran the video file all our monitors have gone to a weird red static and they won't show shit else.

###


	2. 2: The Shores of Hell

****Mike MacDee****

 ** **THE SHORES OF HELL****

 ** **A horror novella based on id software's DOOM****

 ** **4**** ** **th**** ** **Edition****

 ** **Special thanks to Steven Johnson, for inspiring me to keep improving.****

 _ _This PDA is the property of Senior Science Officer Valerie Jackson. If found, please notify Deimos Administration right away.__

 _ _The contents of this PDA are classified. Unauthorized access, download, modification, or removal of these files is forbidden under Mars Patrol Code 143,__ _ _and may result in immediate termination.__

Oct. 14th 2599

4:15pm

A power surge swept through the facility yesterday around 2pm and sent every piece of equipment off the proverbial deep end. Fortunately it did not affect the oxygen vents or the gravity engine and no one has been injured, but a few of our higher-strung employees overreacted slightly to the incident. Captain Stern has placed two hysterical workers in detention to simmer down (Richardson and McCabe, I believe). It worries me that so many important machines require emergency maintenance, including our primary database. Dennis has no idea what caused the surge.

Sadly my own PDA was counted among the casualties. I'm grateful to Dennis and his people as always, but he tells me the poor thing required total reformatting, which means I've lost months and months of personal data only two days before my next report to Mars Control. I have naturally backed up all my files, but I seem to have misplaced my jump drives again. No hurry, of course. It won't be the first time I've called in late, and I have quite enough to worry about already with the mainframes running on Safe Mode.

The technicians are working around the clock to get Deimos up and running again. We need to call Mars Control to inform them of our mishap as soon as possible, but we can't do that until the comm systems are operable again. All they're picking up is wave after wave of red static lines. Curious.

I wonder if Hall and the Phobos crew are having the same issues.

—

Oct. 15th 2599

12:02am

The slipgate's circuitry was severely damaged by the surge, and it will take hours if not days to replace it all. Constant delays and budget cuts, two test subjects driven to self-mutilation, and now this. Deimos's morale is hanging by a thread, and all of these technical problems will surely slow progress to a crawl. It may be another month before we're ready for the next probe experiment.

I would kill for a cup of coffee.

—

Oct. 17th 2599

1:28pm

The comm. systems are working again, but it makes no difference now. Mars Control can't help us solve a problem we ourselves do not understand. Everyone is on the verge of total nervous breakdown. No one has any answers for me and it's very frustrating. No one can tell me how the slipgate could activate entirely on its own, nor how it could operate at all without its power source.

Keller and Donovan were reconfiguring the motherboards in the control platform when it happened. The capacitors screeched to life suddenly. Donovan panicked, lost his footing and tumbled down the steps. Keller was less fortunate, still within arm's reach of the platform's nova-arch when it sparked and tore open that familiar swirling black void. Keller staggered on the steps, his hands bubbling and peeling from the heat of the portal's birth. He didn't even notice. His eyes were fixed elsewhere, like the rest of us.

My subconscious will only surrender a few concrete details. No one made a sound as the shape stepped partway out of the void. I remember teeth — large, dog-like teeth. I remember an arm like that of a gorilla seizing Keller by the collar of his jumpsuit. He didn't scream. He just stared in wide-eyed horror at that hideous form. It pulled him through, and the gateway closed. The capacitors shut off all by themselves.

We stood staring for a long time, not saying a word. I almost don't remember evacuating the Anomaly at all, apart from the panicked shouts of Deimos Security still ringing in my ears. The scene plays over and over in a jumbled montage and the details are foggy like the memory of a dreadful dream. All that remains crisp and clear in my mind is Keller's eyes. Huge and white and helpless. A child's eyes. Three glasses of whiskey and still they're as crisp as daylight in my memory.

Deimos Security has sealed the Anomaly until further notice and posted an armed guard at the entrance. Captain Stern reported the incident to Mars Control, but he saw what happened on the security cameras shortly before they stopped working altogether, so he was far from coherent and I'm not sure the administrators took him very seriously.

Deimos Anomaly is completely abandoned. We evacuated everyone. Yet it sounds as though a great number of bodies are scrambling around inside like during routine maintenance. I hear other things amidst the hustle and bustle — animal sounds, grunting and heavy breathing — that have kept me from a good night's sleep for the last forty-eight hours. These sounds easily reach the ventilation ducts and carry throughout the entire facility for all to hear, every hour of the day. They never stop.

I'm afraid for our safety. Captain Stern exhibits bipolar behavior now, swinging unexpectedly into violent outbursts. He almost shot one of his men an hour ago for questioning his orders. He grows worse all the time and the rest of Deimos Security may quickly follow. I've sent Mars Control a formal request for additional support until this problem can be rectified. I still await their reply.

Everyone is looking to me for answers, but I haven't any. No one has slept in a long time. With any luck Mars Control will resp

It's quiet now. Deimos Security reopened the Anomaly and found nothing. Every piece of equipment lay exactly where we left it. Unfortunately they still found no trace of Keller.

The silence is not as comforting as I'd hoped. Our sleep is restless.

—

Oct. 18th 2599

What has happened? What has happened to the sky? What has happened to the stars? Blood red stretching to eternity! It blankets Deimos like infernal fog! Where are we? Where is mars? Where is earth? The air stinks of death!

The sounds are back, sweeping through the facility. They tell me Stern shot himself. They tell me there are things in the Anomaly. I don't understand their babbling.

I can see people on the moon's surface. They

All is lost. All is lost. All is lost. All is lost. All is l

###

I can't sleep. The dream was worse than ever this time, and if I don't get it out right now I might lose my head. I can't afford to lose my head in this place.

Part of what makes the dream so horrible is the vivid detail. I still can't make any sense of it, but the images were so crisp and real this time that it curdled my blood. It always starts in a rocky valley with a misty crimson sky. The ground is alive: it churns and moves, and winces as razor rock spires stab through from beneath.

An ash-black fortification sits in the center of the scene, probably stretching a mile across. It looks unfinished, maybe abandoned in mid-construction, and it doesn't seem to protect anything except an empty plot of land. The longer I stare at it the more the walls appear to move like they're covered in legions of angry black ants, and I swear I hear a voice calling to me, but I can never pinpoint the source and it's so faint I can't make out the words. I'm not sure if it's a man or woman speaking.

I see crude mechanical parts knitting themselves together with twitching tendons and strips of bleeding flesh. Flesh and machine coexisting like something from a Giger painting, except rawer and without unity, the two forced together against their will. I stare into a huge, screaming mouth, the teeth and tongue red with blood. It screams and screams, but I hear nothing.

I see Ellen. I see her lying on her back, her clothes gone and her hair snaking every which way in tangled brown strands. I'm suspended above her as if we're making love, but something is wrong. Her face and shoulders are scratched and bloody, her bulging eyes filled with terror. She's crying and screaming, and so am I when the dream finally lets me go.

I haven't stopped thinking about her since. I wish I was with her on Phobos. I wonder if she has any idea what's happened here.

I really need her right now. I'm falling apart.

Dr. Jackson, I hope you'll forgive me for commandeering your PDA, and I hope you'll understand my reasons for doing so. I lost mine during the chaos and I have no idea what's become of it. I promise to return your property as soon as I find you.

—

Dr. Jackson,

Because my efforts to locate you have so far been unsuccessful, I'm going to keep a record of what's been going on in Deimos Base since everything went quiet. That way (hopefully) when I return this PDA to you, you'll have a full report of my discoveries.

I hope you find my writings satisfactory. Ellen is the writer, not me. It's only because of her that I can write legibly at all.

For the past two days I've been hiding in storage cell 201 in the south block of Deimos Labs. I escaped to that room during the initial invasion, and frankly it's a miracle I made it that far. I was assisting Dennis and two others with comm system repairs in the eastern block's infirmary when it all started.

One minute everything was as dull and tedious as always; the next, the screens and speakers were alive with howling nightmares. I'd just looked up when it happened and didn't get a good view of the image on the screen before it returned to static. If that screeching voice was any indication — or the expression on Dennis's face, as he'd been looking directly into the screen at the time — then I was better off not seeing it.

Dennis screamed bloody murder for five minutes, cussing and spitting and shoving us away when we tried to calm him down. He swore to god "it" could see him. We didn't know what the hell he meant, and he never explained because he was far from articulate at that point. Dennis was the most laid back techie on Deimos, even after the incident in the Anomaly that permanently left everyone on the verge of total panic; to watch him go completely unhinged in an instant rattled our nerves.

When Dennis stopped shouting we realized the noises from the Anomaly had started up again, this time right outside the door, in the hallway leading to Central Labs. Huffing and snarling and the thud-clack, thud-clack of clawed feet hammering onto the floor panels. We heard gunshots and shouting and what sounded like bottle rockets bursting.

Patterson shot past the infirmary door from Central's direction, sobbing and whimpering. Her left sleeve was missing, her arm chewed up and oozing like it'd been stuck down the garbage disposal.

A fleshy blur charged past a moment later. Its breath came in deep canine pants and it left a trail of blood and spit on the floor behind it. Patterson's sobs rose to shrill, unbearable wailing.

We scattered. We scattered and left Dennis on the infirmary floor, apologizing to god for his sins. The panting sounds filled the room just as I darted out the back exit and into a hallway stinking of shit and sulfur.

At the three-way intersection to my right stood Captain Stern and a dozen fully-armed Deimos Security men, all of them staring down the hall at the maelstrom Patterson had tried to escape. People screamed and howled. Creatures slobbered and hissed. Bones cracked. Captain Stern's face turned a sickly gray. Without hesitating, and without taking his eyes off the approaching horror, he drew his pistol and put a bullet through his head.

The other officers lost it: half of them opened fire and let loose with one curse after another; some of them went stiff and couldn't move at all; two of them turned tail and ran. I followed their example and crawled into the maintenance tunnels beneath the floor. Something grabbed my ankles and tried to pull me back out, but by some miracle I managed to slip away.

As I crawled, I watched from the maintenance tunnels as our security men, possessed by malignant spirits, gleefully shot in the back the people they were sworn to protect. I watched golden-brown demon simians bombard my coworkers with volleys of fiery missiles. I have no idea where they kept them — it seemed like they just lit up in their palms at will — but they threw them like major league pitchers, then pounced on their prey while they writhed in burning agony.

I watched these monsters do a lot of terrible things, but I'm sure you did, too. Things worse than killing. Things that I wouldn't wish upon the vilest human being who ever lived. You'll understand if I refrain from sharing them all here.

I heard Fairchild and a couple others shouting for everyone to seek shelter in the chapel, but I couldn't reach any of them to join in. I made it to the storage cell and had to seal the door from the inside before a demon could force its slobbering head through - a pink abomination with jaws like a giant bulldog. There I hid for two days between crates of thermal paper, wishing I'd taken Dennis with me. Wishing I hadn't been a coward like the others.

I thought the noises would go on forever, but they only lasted a couple hours. It was pretty quiet from then on, except when once in a while something came pounding at the storage cell door for a few minutes. Two more power surges hit the base, and the lights still haven't recovered. Most of them flicker and pulse randomly or don't work at all.

Following the last surge, Deimos Labs went dead quiet and I decided to brave the halls. I've done a perimeter sweep of the south block and stocked up on supplies: a medical kit, a Deimos Security radio, some rations, a 9mm pistol and three spare mags. So far no one has responded to my calls, but I'll keep the radio nearby just in case.

Many of the halls and rooms are spattered with blood and entrails, but I've found no bodies. I'm going to get more supplies before I move on to the rest of the facility. I feel like I'm in survival training all over again. Maybe I shouldn't have quit the army after all.

The stories I've read about war veterans suffering from survivor guilt never made sense to me until now. It's hit me hard. I can't figure out how a sniveling coward like me could make it to safety while greater, braver men were torn to pieces right outside the door, right where I could hear their screams and sobs. Stupid, self-destructive asshole lives while everybody else dies. It's not right. Father Mathis would call it a chance for redemption, but he's not here to comfort me now. I dread to find out what's happened to him.

—

Dr. Jackson,

It turns out I wasn't the only one sneaking around this place. I've just been chased through the containment area by a trigger-happy maniac in a techie jumpsuit. The man came out of nowhere and opened up on me with a shotgun.

I ducked around a corner as his last two shots whizzed past my head, and when I heard his weapon click empty I stepped back out, took aim at his heart and squeezed off three shots. Triple bullseye just like in boot camp. He died screaming an angry string of nonsense words.

I had to wait a half hour for my hands to stop shaking before I could write about it. Until today I'd never killed anything bigger than a prairie dog.

He must be a newbie because I don't recognize him, and I couldn't find any ID on him (or extra ammo). Caucasian, about thirty-four, brown hair, short goatee on his chin. His eyes are missing just like the security men that were possessed during the invasion, but the green flames have gone out. His face is bloody around the mouth like he's been eating raw meat — maybe munching on the scraps lying around the base. Lord, there's a nice thought.

I have a shotgun now, so hopefully I'll be prepared if I run into more of them.

It's possible this zombie was following me: for the last half hour I've been unable to shake this odd sense of a presence in the base. It's lulled somewhat, but it's definitely there. The security cameras are all offline, yet I feel like someone is watching me. Occasionally I hear a thump in the air vents that makes my hair stand on end.

Now I'm beginning to hope I __am__ the only one left on Deimos. I guess I'll know for sure after I've checked the other sectors. Heading to the chapel first, in the hope that you, Mathis, and the others made it there in one piece.

—

Dr. Jackson,

The radio began to pick up some unsettling sounds, so I tossed it. You would've responded to my calls by now, anyway, if you had your own radio handy. And I'm fairly certain you would respond in English or some other human language, and not the godawful nightmare babbling I got instead.

Deimos Base was so quiet I've decided to spend the entire day exploring it, searching for survivors, supplies, and a way to contact Mars. In the residential sector I was lucky enough to procure a UAC envirosuit, without which I couldn't have searched the toxin refinery so thoroughly.

Here is what I've discovered so far:

1\. Deimos Labs, the refinery, the residential sector and the hangar are completely deserted. The walls are covered with bullet scratches, spattered blood, and a few other things I'd rather not mention. Most of the furniture has been upturned or broken, and a few computer monitors have been smashed in. Apart from these details, it's like nobody had set foot in here since the day it was built. Haven't yet checked the command center or the nuclear plant, and I hope to find you holed up in one of the two. I can't be the only one left.

I have yet to even find another PDA — it's like somebody went around and collected them all after the attack. All the useful supplies are gone: weapons, ammunition, stimpacks, electronic equipment, you name it. Nothing left but nutri-bars, unopened crates of uniforms, and a pocketful of security cards that I don't need because I can hack any door in this place (I fix them, after all). I hope the lockers at Security HQ aren't as bare.

2\. The slipgate is gone — nova-arch, capacitors, control platform and all. There is now a gaping pit in the center of the lab floor where it used to be, and the bolts that secured it are scattered all over the floor. Evidence shows the whole thing has been removed proper-like, but how or why anyone would remove it from the Anomaly is beyond me. Is this your doing?

3\. Deimos no longer orbits mars, and god only knows where we are now. If that isn't noteworthy enough, every sector seems to have at least one area where parts of the hull have been torn away, leaving massive portals to the moon's surface. The refinery is missing several sections of its ceiling: when I stepped through the entrance I looked straight up into the starless crimson sky and found to my amazement that I could still breathe. That explains how people could walk on the moon's surface as you described (I have yet to see these visitors, myself).

4\. In at least two sectors the coolant tanks have ruptured, turning a number of rooms into noxious lakes. I've sealed these areas until further notice.

5\. Deimos may be unstable: three small tremors have hit the facility in the last hour.

6\. The comm. systems are all kaput, right down to the modem: I can't even email your office, let alone Mars Base. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the wifi satellite must be all the way across the cosmos from here, which kills what little confidence I had in the command center's radio. In short, we have no way of contacting anyone anywhere — we are completely cut off from the rest of humanity.

I've been brooding on discovery number six for a long time. Once again I would like to formally protest Deimos Base's "no liquor" policy.

I'm in the hangar security checkpoint now, on my way to the command center via the containment area. With a little luck

There goes another tremor. If this rock starts to break apart I don't know what we'll do.

—

I saw something outside. I know I did. I saw it while searching the lounge in the southwest block of Deimos Labs, the one with the two adjacent windows looking out on that field of scattered craters.

It looked like a single torch standing maybe half a football field's distance from the base. After watching it for a minute it appeared to be moving slowly as if someone were carrying it at head level. I thought maybe it was a survivor signaling for help and rushed to the window, hoping to spot whoever was carrying the light source, but I didn't see anybody. For a brief moment I thought I saw a glowering face in the flame. Just when this idea began to sink in the whole thing suddenly whisked away, and then it was gone.

I've been staring out this window for a long time. There's nobody out there.

—

Dr. Jackson,

The facility is a conscious entity, I'm sure of it! The visions from my dreams are attacking me while I'm wide awake! The flesh-and-machine imagery has begun to take less abstract shapes: writhing, skinless horrors mounted on steel crucifixes, their crude metallic bones and organs jutting out of their bodies as if trying to escape. The wall is growing into a black fortress of some kind — I watch the ants build it up from nothing. Do you see it all, too? Do you hear the voice gibbering? Or am I just losing my head altogether?

I can't be going crazy. I've got to calm down.

Ellen appears in brief, jarring glimpses as she's clawed and bitten and violated again and again, and all I can do is watch like some twisted voyeur. I try to think of our better times together — our wedding, our first trip to Mars — but the presence won't let me. It tarnishes every happy memory I pull out of the box.

Calm down, goddammit.

My throat is swollen. I haven't touched the bottle in so long. The presence is trying to dig that up, too.

It's just occurred to me that despite countless hull breaches the gravity is normal. It's too light to be the gravity engine's doing, but it's also definitely not Deimos's flimsy gravitational pull. I stepped outside and took a little stroll along the north side of the facility and found I could walk around just fine.

Not surprisingly there are fields of debris around the open sections of the hull: glass and metal slivers, expended ammunition casings, occasionally fragments of broken furniture or a trickling creek of demon blood mixed with industrial waste. Nothing very useful. No signs of life out there, human or otherwise. And no torches like the one I saw before.

The sky in this place is unnerving — it is identical to the sky in my dream, right down to the blood red haze creeping down to the moon's surface (but the ground is thankfully not alive). I'm beginning to think we've been sucked into the belly of a gaseous planet.

The outer environment is as still as a graveyard. No climate except an unforgiving dry heat — odd, considering the fog — and of course the tremors I mentioned before. I experienced only one while I was out there, but I noticed a consistent rhythm to the quakes that made me nervous and I decided to go back inside. It reminded me of the dinosaur films that frightened me as a kid: the thud-thud of the T-rex's feet as it approached from off-camera.

Once I reached the northeast corner of the base I could see the nuclear plant. The corridor connecting it to the rest of the base has been utterly annihilated. It's now a brisk walk across that hellish landscape to the entrance, and I'm not comfortable enough with the environment to walk around in the open. I'll check it out later.

—

Dr. Jackson,

There is an alien temple in the middle of the containment area.

I don't know what to make of it. In the middle of the millions of crates and dull sepia metal walls is the big iron doorway leading to the entrance to the processing area. It should be a big, octagonal room with x-ray scanners and pushcarts and annoyed workers insulting each other's mothers. All of that is just __gone__.

In its place is a massive hypostyle of green soapstone: a long, green hall leading into a circular chamber of towering green pillars and flickering candelabras.

I stood in the doorway, staring for a long time, trying to wrap my head around it. Meanwhile an eerie hum rode the air, emanating from somewhere deep inside the alien castle. It goaded me to enter. I debated whether to take a peek or turn tail and run. What if it slipped back into its own dimension with me inside?

I decided to go no further than the pillar room, do a quick scan, then get the hell out. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. I stepped over the threshold.

There was no sign of life except the shadows dancing on the walls, making the soapstone appear to writhe and pulsate like the skin of a colossal organism. I crept as far as the middle of the room, hearing nothing but the ominous hum, glancing upward once I cleared the entrance hallway - the ceiling went up forever, vanishing into pitch darkness at twenty feet. The pillars were carved from end to end with grotesque murals of blood orgies, the sort of art you'd find in a museum in Hell.

From there the layout of the base was unrecognizable: green hallways twisting endlessly in every direction, decorated with animal skin tapestries. Alien terrain was somehow bleeding into Deimos from another dimension. And it stank like the marriage of a crypt and a zoo.

Somewhere deep within the demonic compound I heard a long, low howl that made me consider turning back, and maybe running until my legs broke. As if hearing this thought, the room erupted in an ear-shattering chorus of screeches.

They swarmed down the pillars like cockroaches - a dozen shit-brown imps, gnashing their chainsaw teeth together and murmuring like monstrous infants who hadn't been fed in days. As soon as the first one touched ground, it leapt for me like a jumping spider, face-first into the barrel of my shotgun. Its head vaporized in a cloud of blood and gray matter. The second lost an arm at the shoulder.

Lost my orientation turning and shooting one imp after another - that damn room was so symmetrical. In my attempt to fall back I didn't realize I was backing toward the wrong hallway, one that led further into the compound, until I felt the hot breath of a bulldog on the back of my neck.

Only luck saved me: I dove face-first against the wall to get clear of its beartrap jaws just as the imps let off a volley of fireballs at my last known position. Hot air scorched my face as one whizzed past my head, missing by a matter of inches. The rest hit the bulldog square in the face and chest and left its raw pink flesh blackened and smoldering. With a furious snarl it forgot all about me and pounced on one of the culprits, pinning it to the marble floor and ripping its face off with its teeth. Two other imps joined in, either to save their comrade or share in the feast. The rest seemed confused by the sudden infighting, and couldn't decide whether to watch the brawl or keep after me.

Panic overwhelmed me. I ran blindly into the demon compound, praying for the first time in my life.

I don't know how I got out in one piece, save for the fact that these demons are easily confused. The place was like an ant colony: dozens of demonic workers either busied themselves with tasks I didn't stop long enough to analyze before I shot them, or scrambled hopelessly around their lair to find where the shooting was coming from.

I only stopped to catch my breath once, when I stumbled into a cluster of technicians who had been strung up like meat at a butcher shop - I think one of them was Dennis, but he was so badly maimed I couldn't be sure. There was a pair of former engineers there, removing the dead men's body parts with chainsaws and feeding them into the conveyor belt scanners: they'd converted them into some kind of meat processing machine.

They smiled when they saw me. I shot them both.

By the time I found my way back to the storage area, there must have been a hundred of the things looking for me - I'd shaken up their ant farm and left them to clean up the mess. None of them knew where I'd gone, or else the entire legion would've followed me. They'd have caught me by now.

My ammo is low, and I jump at the slightest sound. I'm praying again that I'll find you and the others at the chapel. My hands shake worse than ever. If I run into more of them, I'll be too useless to shoot straight.

Definitely not letting my curiosity get the better of me again.

—

Dr. Jackson,

Couldn't access the chapel from the main junction, so I moonwalked around the outer hull to the chapel garden. Walking outside, you feel even more isolated: the endless sea of bloody mist and nothingness seems to stare back at me when I gaze across the rocky landscape at it. The quiet and desolation are unnatural, as if Deimos Base is all that remains of the universe.

It's forever out there.

The garden dome had been smashed, the plant life perverted into some kind of hellish red mulch that flinched when I walked on it. I'm not sure if Ellen would be saddened, fascinated, or horrified. I was the third, my panic agitated by the zombie-like chorus of chants oozing into the garden from further inside. When the lichens started pawing my ankles, I didn't waste another second scrambling into the building. I had to hack the door to get inside, and sealed it behind me just in case something followed me from Containment.

The chanting was emanating from the walls, courtesy of a sound system. It wasn't comforting. The voices sounded ancient, bleakly channeling the vengeful god of the Old Testament, or maybe another, even older god long since forgotten.

As fellow atheists, I don't think either of us ever set foot in the chapel sector before. The interior surprised me: a Roman Catholic cathedral designed by Ridley Scott. The ceilings are staggeringly high and the wall panels have been stylized to resemble brick and mortar, maybe to remind worshipers of home. It would be more convincing without the life support pipes and computer guts peeking out at me every so often.

The oratory is huge and C-shaped, wrapping inwardly around a sort of observation booth with an elevated view of the entire chapel. The garden connects directly to the latter, through a giant cross-shaped doorway. The booth control panels included the sound system controlling the unnerving chants droning endlessly throughout the sector. Through the window directly ahead I could see the pews and altar on the floor below, a giant crucifix mounted on the back wall. The statue of Jesus is ten feet tall and limply hangs his head to show off the crown of thorns jutting from his scalp. When I arrived there were a dozen bodies scattered among the pews, wearing the uniforms of every caste of Deimos Base: techies, security, etc. Fairchild stood at the altar, delivering a sermon, looking tall and powerful like a warrior priest in his Security armor.

Another handful of survivors was scattered around the oratory, sitting by themselves and looking catatonic or inconsolable. A couple of space marines were making rounds, going from one to the next, dragging them to their feet and shoving them toward the pews. They went without resistance, except for the admin weeping to himself in the corner. A big gorilla of a space marine picked him up like a doll, shook him, slapped him a few times, then dragged him to the pews, ignoring his pitiful wails. The whole thing looked like a kind of depressing space bible camp, where missing prayer was against the rules.

A couple of oddities caught my attention. Through the right window, I could see the oratory floor panels had collapsed to reveal a large, flowing river of thick, oily, blood-red putrescence, likely the source of the sickly smell tickling my nose like the stink of rotten fruit. The survivors had constructed a makeshift bridge in order to freely cross to the maglock doors ten paces away on the other side; otherwise they couldn't leave the chapel except through the garden. The doors were sealed, presumably set to open with a passkey.

Out the left window was a makeshift altar of some kind, made from a triangular red card table; a tall, metal pole pierced it through the center. A man was (and still is, last I checked) tied to the pole like a prisoner awaiting a firing squad. He sits there with his legs crossed and his head hanging like the statue of Christ. He doesn't look at anyone; and anyone who comes near him seems to hurry past, making sure not to look at him. Kerrigan, the new kid from the Marine Corps, was guarding him when I first saw him.

The prisoner weakly lifted his head, somehow knowing I was watching him. Even through his badly bruised face I could tell it was Jerry McCabe from Engineering.

Nearly leapt out of my suit when the shotgun barrel pressed into my spine. "Drop it, fucker."

I dropped my piece. "If I weren't human, I'da shot you."

She sighed with relief. "You'da tried. Turn your ass around."

I turned and was greeted with the smiling face of Brody from Security, whose face always looked too pretty and damsel-like for a soldier. She crushed me in a hug and returned my shotgun to me, then took me downstairs to the oratory.

We passed a long line of still forms covered with white, bloodstained tarps, a rosary laid on each - nine bodies in all, polluting that corner of the chapel with the stench of death. Brody didn't pay any mind to them.

I started beaming when I saw old Father Mathis, alive and well. He hugged me with a sad laugh and said, "Took an invasion from Hell to get you to come to church. Better late than never."

I jokingly said, "No atheists in foxholes."

Brody angrily shushed us, taking offense to my chattering during the sermon. I would've argued if she wasn't cradling that twelve-gauge in her arms. That's when I noticed the other Security grunts were armed with the same, looking ready for a firefight. Some of them were eyeing me like they wanted to crush me beneath their boots. At "Amen" the sermon was over, and Fairchild wearily collected his shotgun from beside the altar and approached me and Mathis.

You know how the relationship between tech and security is like a regression to the old high school war of nerds vs jocks. Fairchild was always nice to me in spite of that, and always barked at any of the grunts who tried to push me around - maybe because of my army training. The only time he ever got on my nerves was when he encouraged me to visit the chapel and "reconsider" my misguided view of the universe in a friendly but condescending way. Apart from that, he was always the cool boy who could make anyone feel good about themselves. Seeing him alive and well, grinning his boyish grin at me, was an immense comfort. For a while I forgot all about the eerie chanting and how parched I was for whiskey.

He grabbed one of my hands and roughly patted my shoulder. "God's sure looking out for this one, isn't he, Mathis?"

Mathis laughed nervously.

"You make it here all by yourself?"

"The base seems abandoned. Traded shots with a few ghoulies on my way over here." I described the former humans I killed in the containment area, but Fairchild sucked his teeth and shook his head.

"Doesn't sound like any of ours," he said. He added solemnly, "And we lost plenty. We've been praying for their souls today. They sacrificed a lot for us."

I glanced back toward the makeshift graveyard in the back of the chapel. "What happened?"

"Xander took twelve volunteers to procure arms and equipment. There's enough food and water in the pantry to last us a few months, but we're badly under-armed." Fairchild stared off into a memory that chilled him to his core. "Only Xander made it back alive. There wasn't much left of him. Got the gist of what happened from his babbling and then put him out of his misery."

"I counted only nine in the cemetery."

Fairchild shuddered, still lost in his thousand-yard stare. "I couldn't bring 'em back."

"The chapel is a fortress. Why bother with more guns?"

"I wanted to gear everyone up for a raid on the Anomaly: shut down the gateway and maybe send the Devil's army back where it came from."

I chuckled, mostly to relieve stress and calm my shaking nerves. Fairchild gave me a very tiny frown, almost imperceptible.

"You think I'm being metaphorical," he said. "Don't you realize what's going on?"

"I wish __somebody__ did," I said.

Fairchild held his shotgun barrel-first like a cane, tapping the butt against the floor panels. "Judgment Day, Hacker. Basically God's fed up with mankind's shit: neighbor constantly warring with neighbor, man worshiping money and celebrity before God, man celebrating his basest vices and throwing spirituality to the wind. We've grown too big for the petri dish: human society is an amoeba that remains united and harmonious for ten minutes before splitting off into endless sub-sects that all want to eat each other, our only priority the satisfaction of our most primal urges."

He gestured to the altar, and the giant crucifix which seemed to be looking down on us with pity. I somehow felt the pity was directed at me, specifically.

"God's punishing us now like a stern father to his disobedient brood. We've tried fighting against the things, but Satan's legions are endless. There's no point." With a shaky sigh he gazed past me, toward the graveyard of fallen soldiers. "We've already seen that. The networks are down, and there's no contact with Mars __or__ Phobos. So now we pray and ask for his mercy. Hold out for a rescue shuttle in the meantime."

"Isn't it a little early to write this off as a biblical plague?" I said dismissively. I glanced at Mathis to gauge whether he agreed with anything Fairchild said.

He was looking at me intensely, his eyes bursting with alarm. It clashed so much with his otherwise docile old face that I lost my voice.

Fairchild looked no different than before, despite the apparent alarm in Mathis. "You're welcome to stay with us as long as you don't rock the boat. These people are very delicate, and it's my duty to protect them. I do that by keeping order. When you're awake, you attend the sermons. We need all the souls we can get."

I nodded, humoring him. He ordered one of the space marines to get me something to eat from the pantry, and my stomach growled in agreement. I sat with Fairchild and Mathis in the priest's quarters and explained my findings while I stuffed my face, including the disappearance of the slipgate. Fairchild listened attentively, nodding now and then. He smiled at the end, apparently his old self again, and slapped me on the shoulder.

"Glad to have you with us, Hacker. Dennis always said you were irreplaceable."

I was reunited with several of my shift buddies: Cartwright and Dansen, Fast Eddie, and Lola, who had to be kicked awake to welcome me. Post-sermon, Brody finally loosened up a bit, and so did Kerrigan. Kerry seems nice enough for a jarhead, if a little thick. Wallace is the gorilla I saw thumping on the weeping admin, about as friendly as a poorly-raised rottweiler. Brody and I are both from the same small Indiana town, so we made fast friends discussing the old stomping grounds - it did wonders to relieve the stress of our situation. Even so, part of her still seemed distant, like she was afraid to make new friends.

She's a breath of fresh air in any case: all anyone else talks about is the religious aspect of what's happened to Deimos. I try to talk shop with Eddie and the others to ease their minds, but they keep going back to the topic of whether the creatures are hellspawn or aliens, or whether we're being punished by God. Most of them lean toward Fairchild's view: that Hell has come to Deimos, cut us off from the rest of the solar system. Anything to the contrary seems to leave them uncertain, even uncomfortable. Eddie is the only one willing to listen to reason, but no more willing than the others to discuss alternatives within earshot of the ever-present guards.

"Don't make Fairchild angry," said Eddie. Wallace dragged him to the pews for routine prayer before he could elaborate.

The others I don't know very well. I recognize a few faces and names. The only admin down here is a jittery file clerk named Benson, the guy Wallace was picking on, who spends most of his time jumping at the slightest sound or blubbering like an infant. Wherever I go, whoever I talk to, Security watches me like teachers on playground duty. Brody is the most social of them, though like I said, she's not the opinionated jock-girl I knew her to be before the invasion.

All-in-all there are twenty-five people holed up here, eight of them armed Security grunts under Fairchild's command. He has someone praying in the pews at all times, dragging people out of bed when he has to, and denying them food if they resist.

Fairchild did a fine job securing the place. Deimos Chapel was designed as an emergency shelter in case of life support or other critical failures: it has its own power and air supply, its own food and water cache, and several cozy bunkhouses. As long as the doors hold, it's impregnable.

Yet everyone here still seems afraid.

—

Dr. Jackson,

Kerrigan nearly shot me for trying to talk to Jerry, like I was trespassing on a secret air base. It took Brody, Mathis, and Fairchild to stop him from making it happen.

Jerry had been exiled from the chapel for mutiny, along with Fred Harrison and several others. Jerry had returned days later, and in an attempt to get back inside, he had inadvertently brought the demons to their doorstep. Two space marines died trying to seal the door again. Brody, Kerry, and Wallace were the reason he was so beaten up, having gotten a little too excited during his arrest. I guess they needed an outlet after watching their shift buddies get peeled like oranges.

Trying to make light of it, I said, "What're you gonna do, put him in front of a firing squad?"

Fairchild smiled and chuckled, but didn't answer.

Jerry keeps watching me hopefully. I also catch Brody looking his way now and then with her basset hound eyes. I tried to talk to her, but Fairchild pulled me aside, grinning boyishly, and shared his whiskey flask with me. We were instantly the best of friends, weak-willed asshole that I am.

All of the people serving under him were from Stern's shift, not his, so apart from Mathis I'm the closest thing he has to a friend here. We reminisced on the staff basketball games, and the time we worked together to fix the fire sprinklers when they went off by accident and wouldn't shut off for an hour. That must've been the first time I ever saw you angry.

Like the others, he found a way to get back to his favorite topic. He laughed bitterly as he capped his flask and said, "I'd give anything for a nice, fat goat."

"Tired of the preserves already?"

He turned his half-smile to me and said with utter sincerity, "For sacrifice."

I blinked. He laughed as if I were the strange one.

"C'mon, man, you've at least __read__ the bible, right? Animal sacrifice was a common thing back in the day. It's all over the Old Testament."

"Thought that was a pagan thing."

"Nah, man. The animal was a stand-in for the sinner: it would die in the sinner's place to cleanse him of his transgressions. Eventually mankind was so filthy with sin that it took Jesus Christ as the ultimate sacrifice to cleanse our souls, dying on __everyone's__ behalf. Since then, we haven't had to sacrifice goats and lambs 'cos all our sins were covered." He could still see I wasn't buying it, and looked sheepishly at the floor. "I dunno. I dunno how else to make Him listen."

I asked why his flock was so scared, pointed out that the oppressiveness of his tiny army seemed to be the cause. "They'd be more scared without us," he said.

Later Brody tried to talk to Jerry, but was reprimanded by Fairchild. In his typical friendly-but-concerned manner, he asked her if she'd rather stand guard on the other side of the chapel door. She went sheet white and stammered, "No, Sir," in a quiet voice.

The space marines guard us even while we sleep in the bunkhouse. I tried to sleep, but every time I closed my eyes, Ellen's suffering continued - it left me feeling restless, so I feigned sleep whenever Wallace lumbered past my bunk. If I have to sit through another goddamned sermon I'll feed __myself__ to the monsters.

When he changed shift, I was relieved to see Brody patrolling in his place. The other grunts are friendly (for the most part), but distant - they stay cordial with everyone outside of their clique, when they aren't thumping them around for skipping the hourly sermon. I'd like to have a friend among them, and I think Brody is the best bet. She's the only one I've been acquainted with, and the others seem too loyal - or too afraid - to defy orders.

I made sure my neighbors were sleeping soundly before gesturing her over to my bed. I quietly asked what she wanted to talk to Jerry about.

She stared at me as if trying to decide whether or not to beat me back to sleep. I asked if she had wanted to apologize; it softened her, and shame filled her eyes like shot glasses. She said she didn't mean to beat him so badly, but for a few minutes she had been nothing but rage. The demons he'd let into the chapel had sent her into shell-shock: during the initial invasion she had watched her fiancee Ben quartered like a Christmas duck. Watching it happen again just sent her over the edge.

She strained to hold back the tears as she talked.

"You know the slipgate is our only chance of going home," I said. "It's the key to this whole thing. I'm trying to find out what happened to it. If Fred and Dr. Jackson are alive, we can get it up and running again. You can help."

"How?" she said guardedly.

I asked her to talk to Fairchild and the other troops - convince them to form a small recon team for a quick sweep of the facility. Even with four guns, we could hold off that horde I narrowly escaped from. The idea put Brody back on her guard, and she shook her head. "You do what you think you gotta do, but you do it on your own."

She's been ignoring me ever since. At least she's sparing me from the depressing sermons.

—

Dr. Jackson,

The Church of Fairchild is a concentration camp. I'm not sure who's worse: the demons, or us.

I was awoken by shotgun fire - a single shot, as far as I could tell. Thinking the worst, I sprung out of bed and drew my sidearm, shaking the sleep from my brain as I ran out to the oratory, where the bark of the shotgun still reverberated off the phony brick wall panels.

Lola was sobbing just outside the bunkhouse, sitting on her knees beside the splayed body of Fast Eddie, his head a bloody smear on the floor, his limbs twitching. Fairchild stood over him with a smoking shotgun, addressing the dumbfounded congregation behind him. Wallace and the others were in position to drive them back, in case they decided to rush him - the sheep-like terror in their eyes told me the idea was furthest from their minds.

"No more arguments," he said with unnatural calm. "It's my duty to protect you all. If you'd rather take your chances with those things out there, I will put a bullet in your head and save them the trouble. It'll be a helluva lot __quicker__ than what __they'll__ do to you."

Fairchild then turned his eyes to me, seemed surprised to find me standing there with my gun in both hands, pointed at the floor. His eyes fell to my weapon, then came back to me.

"Where you going with that piece, Hacker?" he said curiously.

I glanced around me at the other space marines and found them watching me intensely. Wallace seemed eager for me to try something. Brody was shaking her head urgently at me.

I put the piece back in its holster. "I thought there was trouble."

Fairchild sighed sadly. "There was. It's over now."

—

Dr. Jackson,

Normally Mathis would have to drag my ass to the pews for a prayer, but the troops were occupied elsewhere, and I hadn't been able to talk to anyone without a guard breathing down my neck. They watch us like we're cattle, and even when Lola or Dansen is eager to chat with me, their smiles are nervous and hopeless.

"Fairchild's flipped his lid," I said while we hung our heads in prayer.

"He's had to make a lot of tough decisions since we holed up here. These people are out of their minds with fear and need guidance. They need some kind of order to keep them from anarchy."

"Fairchild is no better. He's a scared little boy who has no idea what he's doing. He'll become more dangerous the longer he stays in charge."

"He means well," Mathis said with little confidence.

"So did Hitler."

Mathis shook his head. "His nerves were already badly strained when we first got here. Did a fine job rescuing as many as he could in spite of it. Hasn't been the same since Xander's excursion. I agree that we must look to God for answers, but we can't just sit here on our asses. That's just what everyone else is content to do, and I'm too old to do anything otherwise."

"Why did Fred and Jerry want to leave the chapel?"

"They wanted to do something with the command center modem. Fairchild wouldn't hear it - insisted that only God and the Devil could hear us now - so they tried to steal his passkey and some of the weapons. Fairchild considered it mutiny. He gave Fred and all of his friends the option of facing either a firing squad, or exile from the chapel with no supplies. He actually called it 'excommunication'. They took their chances outside. I don't know how or why Jerry came back, but they wouldn't listen to him. Beat him and tied him to that pole."

Mathis crossed himself. "He hates himself for doing it, and for letting Xander go. Says he should've shot them all and spared their suffering. Won't stop talking to me about the Old Testament: vengeful God, animal sacrifices, plagues, sin and penance..."

"What's he gonna do to Jerry?"

"I don't know. Worry about what he'll do to __you__."

"So my only option is to stay here and die quietly with the rest of you?"

"I'm sorry."

I hissed under my breath. The slipgate is our ticket home. I have to find it, and I have to find you. If Jerry survived, and I survived, you must've survived, too.

That's the hope I'm clinging to, until I find you again. If nothing else, I owe it to you as my mentor to confirm whether you're alive or dead.

—

Dr. Jackson,

I guess it's true you should be careful what you wish for.

The chance was worth taking. I led Fairchild into the priest's quarters to separate him from the others, then, since only a few sectors that I knew of had been searched, proposed a small excursion with several goals: obtain the camera feeds from Security HQ to determine what became of the slipgate, and search for you and other survivors. He surprised me by not outright refusing, maybe because of our military kinship; instead he took me to the chapel entrance and showed me his evidence of the apocalypse. It's getting harder to argue with him.

With a swipe of the passkey, the door whined open...into a demonic mockery of an ancient German castle.

The ceiling was fifty feet high, and brass braziers with skullish faces stared back at us from the walls, their bowls crackling with greenish fire. Light from the chapel spilled into the room; shadows hung like thick drapes on every wall and in every corner - a portal into another dimension, just like the containment area. Fairchild grinned at my reaction, especially when I spotted the signs of demonic decor around the threshold on the chapel's side: the phony brick wall panels were slowly corrupting into hideous green hell-brick.

I absorbed these details in only a few moments before spotting the beady yellow eyes staring from the shadows, glowing faintly like distant stars. Their owner sniffed the air like a dog, then emitted a low growl; out came a slobbering pink gorilla with bull horns and a face made almost entirely of teeth.

It charged two steps forward, then Fairchild perforated it with buckshot. He sealed the door again, looking pleased with himself.

"It gets a little closer every day," said Fairchild, gesturing to the demonic brick around the door frame on our side. "The corruption. You see what I mean? Without God's protection, this evil infects everything. It even infects people, like the ones you shot the other day. Anybody goes out that door, doesn't come back in."

I reminded him that I did fine on my own, and would only need a couple of guns for backup while I searched the remaining sectors. I emphasized that the slipgate is the key to this whole disaster, and that we need you or Fred to get it running again. I emphasized Mathis's point that it's useless to sit still and keep our fingers crossed. Lola vocally shared the sentiment, along with a few others who had been eavesdropping, though they shrank at Fairchild's glare.

The rest, like Cartwright and Dansen, were quiet. Mathis was giving me a pleading look, but didn't say anything.

Fairchild smiled. "You don't know what's out there, Hacker. There's worse things than the walking dead, the spawn of hell, the corruption that spreads like a cancer. Worse than the dream visions that torment us at night."

"Worse than all that, huh?"

"I've seen for myself. Hell, some of em you can't see at all 'til they're on top of you. Go out there and you won't be coming back."

"Jerry came back," I reminded him.

"And brought Legion with him. Discussion's over. Keep pressing the issue and you'll have to join poor Eddie."

Talking to him like one of his subjects wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I got palsy with him. Sure, Eddie wouldn't have lasted five minutes, but we were all army guys. I could take a couple of his shooters on a quick tour of the base, avoid the demon-infested areas, and be back in a couple of hours no worse for wear. Meanwhile he could stay in his castle and be our spiritual cheerleader.

Wallace stepped forward like he was going to bash my skull in, but a gesture from the chuckling Fairchild made him fall back.

"I like you, Hacker, you know that. But going against God's plan is a mistake. The best thing to do is repent and ask for His mercy."

"Well, until he shows up, you don't mind if I try to save our lives myself, do you?"

If I had been anyone else, I might've found out how true Fairchild was to his word - feeding me a bullet rather than tossing me to the demonic hordes. The memories we'd discussed over rye seemed to soften him a little, and he smiled at me. "Tell you what, Hacker: you convince any of my grunts to back you up, you got a deal."

I agreed, insisting I'd only need a couple. Fairchild turned to the survivors. "Okay. Any volunteers?"

The Security grunts stood like obedient statues - apart from Brody, they didn't even make eye contact with me. The civilians tried to find something else to look at. Mathis crossed himself.

Fairchild looked back at me with a grin dripping smugness, and shrugged.

Brody suddenly spoke up. "Fuck it," she said, walking to the door. "I'll go. Let's do this, Hacker."

Fairchild stared at her for a moment, an unspoken order lingering on his tongue. She stared back, boldly waiting for him to reprimand her. He changed his mind, nodded his head. He handed me his shotgun and ammo belt, then presented his passkey, cocking it over the card reader. "Need anything else before you go?" he said.

I didn't say anything. The door whined open, and Brody and I plunged into the depths of Hell.

"I hope to God you know what the hell you're doing," Brody whispered.

I finally got to see the rest of the base - the areas that aren't locked down, anyway. The entire facility is now a hodgepodge of UAC technology, ancient stonework, organic tissues, and other substances that I can't make heads or tails of. It's tearing down and rebuilding itself, but can't decide what it wants to be.

Only one area in Central Labs still has its original green tile walls and normal (though inoperable) computer stations; the rest of the sector (including the Anomaly) is a fortress of giant stone blocks, ash-black like the wall in my dream. Most of the computer panels have been replaced with green marble bas-reliefs of sneering, goat-like figures. I'm sure you've seen them by now - they're all over the facility.

Half the circuitry has been replaced with ugly clusters of pus-colored metal tubes carrying boiling demon blood throughout the walls of the base. I don't even want to imagine what this new system fuels. Some of the floor panels have collapsed to reveal foul rivers of the stuff oozing through Central's maintenance tunnels. I can't stand the smell of it, but the only way to pass these moats is to leap over them with a running start.

Blackish-green vines snake up the walls of several areas. I reached out to touch one, but thought better of it when it twitched. I should save a sample for the Phobos botany lab so Ellen can play with it.

Brody and I have talked little since we set out. We're hiding out in an apartment in the residential sector, eating nutri-bars and deciding where to go next. The base is unnervingly quiet - it's like the demon horde I encountered before was just a figment of my imagination.

The tremors are getting more frequent lately. I hope they're just murmurs in the disgusting new blood-pumping system.

—

Dr. Jackson,

Security HQ is a nest of bulldog demons. We didn't see them, but the air was thick with snorts and snarls - probably a hundred of them napping in there. We're avoiding it for now, but will have to get in there somehow sooner or later to download the camera feeds. Can't connect remotely because the network is down and there's no internet signal.

We're going to check the other sectors for survivors, then come back later and try the maintenance tunnels. We should be able to reach the mainframe from there and jack in directly.

—

Dr. Jackson,

The command center is horrendous, and it gets worse the further in we go. The outermost blocks are concrete and titanium like they're supposed to be, though sprinkled with blood and bullet scratches and a few maimed Deimos Security men suspended from the ceiling like bloody chandeliers. Brody hadn't seen the strung-up bodies before; she was sick and shaken for awhile, but she recovered with admirable speed.

Once you get past the checkpoints and into the inner sanctum you're suddenly standing in a gothic castle of bile-green marble, with all the computer stations replaced by giant stone bas-reliefs like the ones I mentioned before, or satanic altars lined with freshly skinned human bones. These areas are absolutely cluttered with severed heads and twitching bodies skewered on bloody metal poles. They're propped up everywhere like trophies and arranged in odd symmetrical patterns. Brody and I recognized many of the victims - we lost our will to continue for a while.

And my God, the heart of the sector is the worst. We stepped through a security door and into the stinking, spasming gullet of a giant worm — corridors of raw, living flesh that flinch to the touch! And the air is thick with a visceral stench like having my head forced inside the gutted carcass of a dead cow! I couldn't stand being in there for more than a few seconds, so the details I absorbed are scant. Here and there, patches of these fleshy walls have been peeled away in bloody strips to reveal those ugly pipe clusters underneath. All the computers and machines are gone; in their place I found fresh, gleaming hides stretched and nailed onto the walls with runic symbols carved into them.

I really hope that this motley mesh of environments is as distorted as Deimos Base is going to get; that we won't have to spend my remaining days exploring the guts of a gigantic, putrid organism.

The computer center is one of the least affected areas, thank God, but hacking the door is proving a little tricky — I've been at it for the last twenty minutes. It appears to have been welded shut from the inside. Judging by the dents and scratch-marks on my side, it effectively kept the invaders out. It's also kept __us__ out, so we have to find another way in.

"I think Jerry said he and Freddie holed up in this sector," said Brody.

I stared longingly at the keypad of the ruined door. "Fred might still be in there. Or at least whatever he and Jerry were working on. Either way, we oughta get inside. We'll be better off with them than with the Church of Fairchild."

Brody spat. "Trade one sanctimonious prick leader for another, huh?"

More tremors. And we've been jumpy ever since we heard a loud bang coming from the air vents. Feels like we're being watched.

—

I'm in a bit of a spot because I don't know who to write to now. Something I saw in the hall of flesh nagged at the back of my mind for an hour and a half and compelled me to go back, against Brody's protests. Now I wish I hadn't.

I remember the early slipgate test when the portal left you with those distinct burn scars on your arms and face which became the emblem of your resilient character. I suppose you never tried to hide them because they reminded everyone to take every possible precaution with the project from then on.

One of the many hides decorating the hall of flesh wears those same telltale scars. I want to believe it's just coincidence, and that Deimos Base's hard-headed master is alive and well somewhere, maybe cooking up a brilliant solution to this clusterfuck. It pains me to think that I might be the last human being to read these notes.

Brody's angry with me, and with herself for coming along. She hasn't said much since we left the chapel.

I'm glad she's here, but she's jumpier than I am. I'm not sure how she'll hold up if we see combat.

—

Ellen,

It's been a long, long day and I miss you a lot. What I wouldn't give to hold you in my arms for two minutes. Every day I spend in this hell introduces a new horror beyond my comprehension.

The short version is, Brody saved my life today.

Unable to access the computer station or the nuclear plant, we doubled back and tried the maintenance tunnel under Security HQ. The tunnel was ten feet wide and branched in endless veins throughout the underbelly of the sector, the ceiling less than ten feet high and opened up to expose the sector's guts. Webs of pipes and cables dangled everywhere, some as far as the floor. Most of the floor lamps had been damaged in a firefight - even those walls weren't spared the usual bullet-scarring and blood-spattering - so their flickering threw twisted shadows across every surface, which danced eerily as the dangling sector innards swayed to and fro. We were two flies making our way through the lair of a robotic trapdoor spider.

We had just come through a narrow junction and taken four steps into a long stretch of tunnel when Brody grabbed my shoulder to stop me. She was squinting and her teeth were clenched - I could see her jaw muscles twitching from the strain.

She was peering into the darkness ahead, but all I saw were cables and flickering shadows.

Her fingers were white, digging into my envirosuit's shoulder.

"What?" I said.

She didn't respond, but when I tried to move forward again, she yanked me to a halt, then slowly guided me to stand behind her, never once taking her eyes off the tunnel ahead of us.

I was about to ask what the hell was wrong when the thing shifted in place. I almost missed it: a patch of darkness hugging one side of the tunnel ten feet ahead of us. It looked like any of the myriad shadows bathing the corridor...except when it moved, so did the cables dangling above it, as if something the size of a man had brushed them aside.

It moved again, and Brody opened fire. The pellets shredded cables and pipes, and stopped dead in the air where the shadow had moved, spattering red on the wall panels. Something snarled in agony and fell, taking some of the "shadows" with it.

The muzzle flash had revealed its eyes to us only for a blink: a pair of amber spheres glaring at us like a wolf in the darkness of the forest. It was the brief glimpse of another three pairs moving rapidly toward us that convinced us to run.

Brody ordered me through the junction first as she fired wildly at the things. All at once the tunnels filled with snarls and slobbering and rapid, heavy footsteps. Brody put her faith in my memory of the tunnels to take us back to safety while she occasionally spun around to fire salvos of buckshot into our pursuers.

I made the mistake of risking a glance behind us. I never did it again.

I couldn't make out what they were, or how many: they were transparent and blended with the shadows like jellyfish in water. I knew they were big, and numerous, and filling the tunnel behind us like a subway train.

I started screaming, tearing cables out of their sockets when they got in my way, wishing I had a machete to clear a path. We kept getting our arms and heads caught in the damn things, having to waste precious seconds untangling ourselves, sometimes smelling the things' rancid breath before we finally got free and continued running. A curious imp was blocking the tunnel entrance when we finally reached it; he stepped aside after I punched a twelve-gauge hole through his chest, but when more screeched behind him, I dragged Brody up a side-tunnel and took a detour up a maintenance ladder to the roof airlock. I didn't have the access code and had to hack it while Brody kicked the snapping faces of the invisible horrors boiling up the chute toward our legs.

I made it out first and grabbed Brody's wrists as the things began to drag her back under. She started sobbing, kicking frantically as she was dragged deeper and deeper down the chute's slobbering gullet, but I managed to secure a firm grip on her arms and finally hoisted her outside. We sent several wads of lead down the chute before we continued running.

The tremors started up again - as if they were giving chase, too - as we ran across the roof to Deimos Labs, making our way to the chapel garden. Imps swarmed up the side of the base to cut us off, so we dove into the first opening in the hull we came to, the low gravity softening our fall as we landed. As soon as we made it back to the chapel entrance I started kicking the door and shouting for Fairchild to let us in. I kept at it for a full minute - the only thing that changed was the snarls, which had gotten closer. I could hear Fairchild's album of chanting blaring on the speakers inside, and, faintly in the background, another heartfelt sermon - the bastard was drowning us out!

I broke out my toolkit and cracked open the card reader. I average about thirty seconds hacking a door when I'm not under duress. The constant barking of Brody's shotgun didn't help. Neither did the sudden screeching of an imp dropping on us from the ceiling.

It managed to scratch the back of my scalp pretty good before Brody smashed its head in with her shotgun stock. She kept hitting it after it fell, pounding its head into quivering jelly. "Get the fuckin' door open!" she screamed.

With a few more tweaks the light turned from red to yellow. I couldn't get it to open faster than my rusty-ass garage door back on earth. When it had raised about three feet off the floor I yelled for Brody to duck and roll. The chorus of snarls was right behind us - I didn't look to see how many there were.

We were greeted with Fairchild's entire security force, armed and ready to shoot, training their barrels on us as we rolled into the chapel. I didn't wait for Fairchild: I immediately leapt to my feet and hit the "close" switch on our side.

Wallace was grabbing me as I did so. "You're __ghostin'__ us, you stupid motherfucker! Bringin' em right __to__ us!"

He might've bashed my face in if Mathis hadn't shoved his way between us, forcing Wallace back and begging him to calm down. Brody had to restrain the thug to keep him from pasting the old priest's head against the door.

Something grabbed Mathis's ankles and pulled him to the floor - something almost completely camouflaged by the darkness. It dragged him screaming and flailing through the narrow opening, out into the ocean of snarls. The door sealed with a magnetic thud.

I panicked and leapt for the card reader, but Fairchild put himself between me and it, leveling his sidearm at my face. "Hacker, don't. I'll drop you right here."

I stood there huffing furiously, sobbing, not sure what I was going to do. We all stood silently listening to the sounds outside - of the beasts clawing at the door, of Mathis screaming in pitiful agony. Eventually Brody stepped between us and pulled me away, led me over to the pews, where I burst into tears.

Fairchild had us taken to the priest's quarters. After giving a short sermon to calm his followers, he came to apologize for getting rough with me.

I glared at him and said, "Not sorry for locking us out, huh?"

"I told you that door is a floodgate to the damned. You saw first-hand what I'm protecting these people from."

"Two seconds to let us in. Two to seal the door again. You had plenty of time, unless you were just hoping we'd die and prove you right. Keep your fuckin' flock in line."

He made with this ashamed little boy routine, looking at his feet, as he said, "You gotta understand, these peoples' lives are in my hands. If I-"

Brody spat on him.

At that point he didn't bother with explanations, and confined us to the priest's quarters. He leaves a guard on us at all times. I'm not sure what he's going to do with us.

I try to sleep, but that damn voice keeps laughing. I keep seeing your anguished face.

—

Ellen,

Brody shook me awake, said something was going down in the oratory. There was quiet panic in her voice. When the grogginess cleared from my head, I heard voices shouting. Then we were running out of the room.

Wallace blocked the doorway and corralled us back inside. "Where you think you goin'?"

"Wallace, let us through," growled Brody.

I didn't waste my breath: I made my hand into a blade and thrust it up into Wallace's throat. While he staggered there, choking, I brought his face down into my knee with a wooden crack. Took his sidearm and tucked it in the back of my toolbelt, leaving him unconscious or dead on the floor. Didn't bother to check which.

Everyone was standing at the pews, with the armed security grunts positioned all around them. They'd moved Jerry from his pole: Benson and a large engineer were each holding an arm, pinning him on his knees before the heavy wooden altar, keeping his head bowed down. Their faces told me they were reluctant to help, but saw no other recourse, or were maybe too scared to disobey. Jerry was naked, and recently bathed - he was so clean he sparkled in the lamplight.

Fairchild was giving a sermon, marching up and down the aisle between the pews, shotgun in hand. He was quoting John 1:29 when he noticed me approaching. He smiled.

"I know you hate the sermons, Hacker, so I figured you'd rather sleep."

I shrugged as if I were only mildly curious, hands behind my back where they could easily grab and draw the pistol in my belt. "What's going on, 'Child?"

"He's fuckin' crazy is what's goin' on!" sputtered Jerry. "They're all fuckin' crazy!"

"Go back to bed, Hacker," said Fairchild.

He was holding his shotgun passively, not aiming at anything. We were just two buddies having a chat.

"Why's Jerry on the altar, 'Child?" I said, taking a few steps closer. The grunts couldn't see the gun yet.

"He's gonna sacrifice me!" blubbered Jerry. " _ _Do__ something!"

I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly, and it took me a minute to decide whether I believed it or not. Fairchild just smiled sheepishly.

"Is he serious?" I finally said.

Jerry sputtered, "Fred can reboot the system and contact earth! Just take me back to the comp center!"

"We're past technology now, Jerry," said Fairchild. "It had its chance, and it failed. The way we see it, this whole disaster is the result of mankind sinking deep into spiritual debt again. A return to the old ways is in order. We talked about this, remember?"

"Jerry's not a goat, 'Child," I said.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures. God isn't listening to our prayers because they're not enough." He pointed back at Jerry with the shotgun. "He'll hear __this__. As it says in Hebrews 9:22, 'Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness'."

As if punctuating this, the tremors returned. Congregation members began to murmur.

"And if you murder Jerry, and the monsters __don't__ go away? Then what?"

Fairchild smiled and pointed at me and Brody with his weapon. "Then we'll do it in __pairs__."

"Two at a time 'til everyone is dead, huh? Or maybe all these frightened and confused people get it in their heads to sacrifice the crazy asshole who's imprisoned 'em here."

Fairchild laughed. He drew his combat knife and turned back toward the struggling Jerry.

When I was inside twenty-five yards I drew the pistol and aimed at his spine. "Take another step and you're dead, 'Child. This's gone far enough."

He glanced back at me, one eyebrow cocked. He glanced around him at the other six space marines. "You gonna take us all, Cowboy?"

"Just you," I said, struggling to keep my aim steady as the tremors worsened. "Doubt you'll much care what happens after that."

As the chapel quaked, everyone just stood staring at everyone else for a full minute, nobody knowing what to do. Jerry resumed begging Fairchild to let him go and help Fred. The guys on the altar assured me it had to be done. I said it didn't. Some of the congregation agreed, but only with their frantic eyes. Most of them remained silent, and I wasn't sure which way they leaned, except it must've been toward Fairchild's crazy sacrifice idea because they didn't try to mob him. The space marines all had their guns trained on me, ready to blast me to ribbons.

Fairchild seemed about to tempt fate and bring his knife closer to the altar, and my finger was tightening on the trigger, when the tremors suddenly stopped.

The chapel shook again, more violently than ever, in the wake of a tyrannosaurus roar blaring from outside.

Then everything went white for a minute as the wall behind the crucifix exploded. Benson and the engineer were pulped by shrapnel where they stood; Jerry, protected by the altar, tumbled headfirst into the aisle and immediately began scurrying away on all fours while the congregation flew into a total panic. All of the space marines were turning toward the massive, smoking hole.

The chapel filled with gunfire and screaming as a platoon of former humans came pouring through the hole. The space marines fought poorly and were cut down one by one. The civilians scattered in every direction, squealing in terror; hell's soldiers gleefully shot them in their backs, some pouncing on their fallen quarry and biting into their flesh before they were dead. I saw Lola on her knees, screaming in mindless terror until a stray shotgun blast perforated her chest and knocked her limp like a ragdoll.

Fairchild didn't seem to know the invasion force was there: he was firing wildly into the congregation, blasting baseball-sized holes through the pews, trying to hit Jerry as he scrambled on all fours toward me and Brody. Fairchild's face was a gargoyle of holy retribution.

I squeezed off two shots and hit him in the shooting arm. It threw off his next shot, which missed Jerry by a hair and hit Kerrigan instead, tearing off his leg at the shin. Fairchild roared in fury, but wouldn't take his eyes off of naked, helpless Jerry. He casually switched hands, took aim again, and was minced from behind by a hurricane of shotgun fire. He was already in pieces when the former humans started feasting on him. Then Brody was pulling me toward the observation booth stairs, Jerry leading the way.

I gave her the sidearm so my hands would be free to hack the garden door. We were on the moon's surface in seconds, high-tailing it for the computer center, leaving the chorus of screams behind us.

"Oh, Christ," said Brody, stopping after only a few dozen yards. "What the fuck is __that?__ "

She was staring out across the landscape at the bloody mist on the horizon. The sight was enough to stop me, too.

The floating torch was back, fluttering back and forth in the mist, and it brought its extended family. We only stared for a few seconds, watching as the will o' wisps multiplied like the stars coming out at night. We lost count at fifty before Jerry realized we weren't following, ran back to us, grabbed Brody's arm and yanked her forward.

"Don't look at them!" he screamed. "Don't stop! Move!"

They took off without me. A frantic breath later I tore ass after them, realizing that the will o' wisps were actually moving toward us like an oncoming storm.

We ran for several minutes, stopping only to trip over rocks or stumble into shallow craters. My lungs were on fire, begging me to stop. As we got closer to the airlock on the north side of the computer station, the distant gunshots were replaced with a strange animal-like singing: it couldn't decide if it wanted to be bird or whale, but came in a gleeful, hyena-like rhythm. The closer the dancing torches came to the base, the louder the song became.

In our panic, nobody could remember the code to the airlock door, so I went to work on the keypad. I got the outer door open in just under a minute; we were too hasty getting inside and dogpiled onto the floor. I wasted several precious seconds collecting my tools - with every breath that unearthly melody grew louder and louder, tittering like a herd of malicious whales.

Tools in hand, I threw myself onto the inner panel and ripped it open, shutting out Jerry's and Brody's frantic screaming that I hurry the fuck up. Thirty seconds of work and the door was whining back into the closed position, far too slowly for my liking. The hideous sounds were deafening by then, and despite fighting the urge with all my strength, I took a look outside. It doesn't pay to look at anything on this god-forsaken moon.

I locked eyes with the nearest will o' wisp, big as a basketball, less than ten feet away and diving straight for me. I got an eyeful of its horrible grinning face, eyes blazing with evil green fire. The door sealed before it reached me.

A good stretch of my memory is blank from that point. Brody says I'd spent the next ten minutes catatonic with terror, until Jerry finally brought me around.

The moon's awful presence seemed impressed by our escape. It rewarded us with visions of what happened to the survivors. None of us can sleep tonight.

—

Ellen,

I'm doing well, all things considered, and I hope you aren't too worried about me. Right now I'm resting in the Deimos computer mainframe cell with three other survivors: Fred Harrison, Jerry McCabe, and Brody, whose first name is Lisa, it turns out. Fred's been holed up in here ever since Fairchild "excommunicated" him and Jerry, trying to get the database and comm. systems back online. When they needed something from outside they would crawl in and out through the maintenance tunnels in the ceiling. I do the crawling these days. More on that later.

For the past several days we've worked, eaten, and slept together like a family, and our hellspawn encounters have been minimal. Jerry got a new envirosuit so we don't have to look at his naked ass anymore. He doesn't talk a whole lot - not since his initial blabberfest about how grateful he was that we saved him. During our breaks he just sits in the corner and silently fiddles with his tools. I think he knew something bad was going on before anyone else did — something made him crack on the day of that first power surge, maybe a vision like the ones I'm still suffering from now and then. He'd been fixing the command center radio when the invasion started and got to watch the whole thing on the security monitors.

Fred, the reluctant leader, is the chattiest, and by that I mean he's the only one whose trauma hasn't reduced him to a mute quite yet. I expected Brody to be the one in charge of the group, but she's content to follow orders like a good soldier. Her report of Fairchild's death had a catatonic effect on Fred. The two have slowly warmed up to each other - they don't bicker as much as they did before the invasion.

Fred tells me there were originally eight people in the group, but their numbers dwindled pretty quickly thanks to this realm's main inhabitants, which he calls "death heads": the skull-faced wisps that had chased us into the airlock. He says they swim aimlessly through the air like lost souls searching for a new body, possessing human beings and using their bodies to do all manner of despicable things.

"The death heads got three of us," Fred told me. "Eric and Tina were possessed on the first day and killed Garrett. Then Tim was possessed one morning, and he probably would've killed the rest of us in our sleep if his seizing hadn't woke Mark up.

"They aren't like ghosts exactly. I saw Mark kill one in the hangar when we went to check the radio a week ago. It drifted about like it was on the hunt for us, flicking its fiery tail this way and that and making with all sorts of horrible moaning.

"It jerked to the right all of a sudden when we tried to sneak past, started right for us. Mark raised his gun and shot it between the eyes and it burst in a cloud of fire and smoke. Left us choking and gagging for a while, but it was gone. He killed another three before we got back. They used to be everywhere. When they cleared out, Jerry tried to meet up with the others at the chapel to get more help, but you know how that went. Fairchild basically ran a prison bible camp, wouldn't let anybody leave, unless they made him mad enough to throw them to the beasts."

He'd sent his remaining errand boy, Mark, to the containment area several days ago to pick up a prototype weapon the S.O.'s stored there - presumably the same weapon Fairchild sent Xander to retrieve - and that's the last he saw of him. I asked what he looked like and got a dead-on description of the poor guy whose shotgun I borrowed way back in the containment area. Now I get to run and fetch whatever supplies we need in his stead. That's how I've been spending the majority of my time, while Brody acts as security at home.

The weapon in question is the EMA-300 Dense Plasma Focus Cannon, from now on referred to as the "plasma gun" because fuck the UAC eggheads and their mile-long names for everything. I heard about the plasma gun when the UAC first shipped it up here for testing: essentially a plasma torch with a range of fifty meters, designed to fire in short, rapid bursts so it won't melt in the user's hands. Anyway that's how Fred described it; what I found looks like a new-wave vacuum cleaner. It couldn't have taken the UAC engineers ten minutes to build, yet it's supposedly the most powerful infantry weapon in two worlds next to the BFG-9000. I'll believe that when I see it. I'm stuck carrying it anyway.

The group has been doing hardcore maintenance on Deimos Base's mainframe ever since they sealed themselves in here. The whole computer system is on the fritz and we can't access much of anything except error messages and blue screens of death; it won't even reboot when we tell it. Fred's desperate to fix the problem because he believes it might get the modem working again, and then we can contact Mars Base.

I'm less optimistic. Just how the hell can we connect with a UAC satellite from another dimension? We don't know if we're even in our own galaxy anymore. It could take weeks for any email we send to reach Mars Base! I'm still of the mind the slipgate is our only ticket home. Fred and I have worked intimately with that machine: our time would be better spent finding it and getting it back online, and then we go to Phobos Base and tell the people what's happened here.

I didn't say anything, though. At the moment everyone's hanging by a thread and the last thing I want is to start an argument. We need the networks one way or the other: even if the modem is a long shot, the security videos might at least tell me what happened to the slipgate, and this way I'll be able to safely access them from anywhere on Deimos.

The voice mocks us in a foreign language. I'm beginning to think the others can't hear it. I'm not going to ask, either.

—

Ellen,

Today it has become clearer than ever to me: we are fucked. Trapped in a goddamn nightmare. There are only three of us now, and our nerves are in utter shambles.

The others refused to believe me when I told them what happened. Brody couldn't handle it. She went absolutely batshit. She threw things around the room and screamed and cussed at the UAC and at whatever awful place we've been sucked into. She cussed at me and called me a sniveling goddamn coward, and I battered her pretty good for it. She gave as good as she got, and Jerry had to split us up. I guess we both needed an outlet. She won't make eye contact with me anymore. And Jerry has become unreachable: he's locked himself in an invisible box and stares at his hands all day.

There was nothing wrong at all with Fred's plan. It made perfect sense: shut down the nuclear reactor, then kick-start the backup generator. The mainframe gets a hard reboot and clears the database's cobwebs, hopefully curing whatever the hell is wrong with it. No guarantee it'd work, and it might just as soon roast the mainframe as fix it. But it was worth a shot, and we had nothing better to do.

It was about this time that I told them about the slipgate's abduction from the Anomaly — missing but intact, so far as anyone knows — which got startled looks from everybody. Mark had reported the machine destroyed, maybe after a hasty search of the Anomaly (and I can't blame him, knowing what horrors had spilled out of there); now that I'd cleared up that misunderstanding I didn't even have to suggest a search.

"If this works," Fred said to me, "you and I will figure out what's become of the slipgate. Brody and Jerry can handle the modem without us."

Jerry was set on staying put to watch the system's reaction. Brody has been worried about his mental health for the last two days and didn't want to leave him alone (she's talking sweetly to him now as I write, trying to get him to eat something - he's long since forgiven her for assisting with his beatdown in the chapel).

I took up the plasma gun and went with Fred as backup. We squeezed out the maintenance tunnels and walked for fifteen minutes to the east side of the refinery, where we came to the ruined doorway looking out across that field of debris to the nuclear plant entrance. Not a trace of death heads for miles in any direction.

Fred assured me he would be okay once he made it to the plant, and urged me to get back to the others in case they needed me. I told him I would stay until I saw him reach the other side. The ground quaked a bit, but Fred ignored it and shook my hand with a nervous smile; then he was jogging across the scrap field to that lonely concrete building in the distance.

I should've grabbed him. I should've held him back as soon as the tremors started up.

The time it takes to walk to that door is probably one minute. I kept my finger on the trigger, praying that I wouldn't have to find out the hard way if the plasma gun worked or not. I should've tested it by now, but plasma is ultra bright and I was afraid of attracting death heads.

He was about thirty seconds out when he stopped abruptly, his head turned to the right. I thought of an elk in the woods, how its head flicks up at the sound of a snapping twig. The tremors became stronger — not enough to throw either of us off balance, but we definitely noticed.

He kept perfectly still for almost another minute with his eyes fixed somewhere to his right, and I wanted to step out there with him and do the same but all my muscles had seized up and wouldn't cooperate.

The quakes kept coming, too much like those dinosaurs from my childhood. Tremble, stillness. Tremble, stillness. I was just about to call Fred back when he started moving again, and at first I figured he'd read my mind.

He wasn't moving toward me or toward the plant. He wasn't jogging, either. He pivoted ninety degrees and broke into a dead run in the opposite direction from where he'd been looking so intently.

I shouted to him; he didn't stop or even look in my direction.

In the next instant, the ground exploded around his feet. The sound barrier crackled and rang my ears like church bells. My sense of balance failed me and I fell against the wall, never taking my eyes off the spot where Fred had seemed to vanish in a violent cloud of moon dust. I was moments away from leaping out of the doorway and running to his side when the source of the tremors and my friend's terror finally stepped into view, bringing all the horrid imagery of my nightmares with it.

Thousands of pounds of flesh, bone, and steel sculpted into a twenty-foot monument to horror. Not a patch of skin on its entire body save what little was stretched and grafted over the head; everywhere else, just powerful tendons gripping titanium bone, here and there reinforced with sleek metal plates.

The snarling lips seemed human, but those steel teeth were more canine than anything, and the overall skull structure was bull or bison. Two great black horns arched out from the sides of its head and jutted forward, blocking my view of the eyes.

A hulking torso carried the head like the prow on a warship, the exposed abdomen bulging with clusters of synthetic tubes and cables carrying god knows what throughout its system. Two muscular and very human-like arms were mounted on the shoulders, the right arm baring a set of steel talons that could have easily carried off a full-grown cow.

The left arm's weapon was even worse: a heavy artillery piece surgically attached to the elbow in place of the wrist and hand. It resembled the revolver-chambered rocket launchers I'd seen rigged on the backs of army jeeps during the war. Clinging to the cannon's belly was a six-barreled minigun puking a long, thick trail of smoke.

It walked on tyrannosaurus legs made entirely of metal from the knees down, ending in steel hooves the size of truck tires that shook the moon with every stride they took towards where Fred lay.

He was still moving. His legs were shot up, but he was alive and trying desperately to drag himself out of the cyber-demon's path. It moved so swiftly for its size and mass I don't think he could ever have hoped to outrun it. It was on top of him in seconds, rearing back its head with a furious howl, then crushing him beneath its hoof. It ground him into the moon's surface until there was nothing left.

The "presence" spoke inside my head. The monster, somehow hearing it, looked up suddenly and I saw the eyes for the first time: bright yellow balls of fire and hate burning on either side of its gaping snout. I turned and ran.

Two seconds later the air behind me hissed, and a shockwave threw me forward ten feet and battered my head on the floor. Hot metal fragments and chips of glass rained down on me and burned my hands and face.

The second explosion came from outside the hull to my left and pushed the wall inward a foot and a half. A tiny metal sliver shot past my head and sliced my left cheek just below the eye. The whole block started shaking like a fishing boat in a hurricane, and when I realized it was from the cyber-demon's approaching footsteps, I leapt to my feet and ran all the way to the other end of the facility, where I finally collapsed and threw up.

I was afraid to move anywhere for over an hour. With all these damned holes in the hull that monstrosity has easy access to more than half the base. It's a miracle it didn't catch me days ago while I was exploring the facility in blissful ignorance. All it had to do was reach in and snatch me up.

I feel it tromping around outside. It'll be on the hunt for some time, and it's probably none-too-pleased that I gave it the slip. Oh God, Ellen, what do we do now? Isn't it enough that I've been isolated from you and the rest of my species?

—

Ellen,

That abomination outside never sleeps! Its footsteps have shaken Deimos nonstop for fourteen hours!

We're all very tired and our morale is low. What's worse, I swear I heard sounds in the facility's air ducts just like the day that thing came out of the gateway. I think something is moving around in the base. I'm too scared to investigate, but we're running out of provisions, so I'll have to find out sooner or later.

Brody propositioned me not long ago. She's an emotional wreck, missing her fiancée and scared out of her wits. I know how she feels - and after seeing her in action during our spectre chase, it's hard not to find her desirable - but I couldn't accommodate her because every time she touched me those jarring visions burst into my head. I saw you crying in my arms, scratched and bleeding from head to toe, your wrists bound tight with barbed cables that cut straight to the bone. It made me want to scream and I shoved Brody away. She didn't understand and returned to her cot, crying silently.

As if I don't have enough keeping me awake, the presence is still speaking to me. It talks in nightmarish babbling — like Mark did when he died — but the thoughts it transmits into my head make sense enough that I understand what it's trying to tell me. And I don't like it.

The source of the presence isn't in the base — it's somewhere distant, observing us. Maybe it's the realm, itself. It tells me that the monstrosity patrolling outside the base is "the origin" or "the first" or something like that. I think it means a prototype. After everything useful in Deimos Base was taken away, the cyber-demon was sent to hunt and kill all remaining survivors as a sort of demo.

Its unnatural birth has left it in a constant state of pain and aggression, so its only desire is to relieve the discomfort of its existence by maiming anything and everything it comes across. It's a living weapon in every sense of the term: it doesn't eat, it doesn't sleep, it doesn't die. It'll be out there, waiting, until the end of time. Until our last inch of hope is worn away and we step outside and beg it for the sweet release of death.

The presence laughs as I write this. I have no clever retort for it. I'm too tired. I want to say I wish you were here, but I'm grateful to have you as far across the cosmos from this horrible place as possible.

—

Ellen,

It's quiet outside, at long last. For the first time since the beginning of this mess I had a pleasant dream about you. I dreamt it was early morning in the Santa Monica hotel where we spent that special Fourth of July weekend together the first year we were married. The balcony door was open so the breeze fondled the curtains and the sound and scent of the beach drifted in and crawled between the sheets with us. You were still in bed, watching me while I slept. When I opened my eyes you gave me your silky smile and asked me if I wanted coffee. Before I could answer I found myself wide awake on an army cot, alone.

It was far from significant in itself: one of those little moments married couples take for granted. But it's occurred to me that you and I haven't slept together in almost a year. When was the last time? I know it was during leave — seems like the only time the company gives us anymore — but I can't remember how long ago.

—

Ellen,

Progress on the modem has been good, and it's lifted our spirits considerably. The others are looking better today. Jerry's found his voice again. Brody apologized for the fight and I told her it wasn't her fault. They're both sleeping now as I write this. I want a drink so badly it's driving me out of my mind.

While stockpiling food and water I found a bag of nice Colombian coffee for our percolator in the containment area. We sat around the mainframe cell talking for hours about our families over hot, steaming cups and it helped calm our spirits significantly. That is, Jerry mostly listened while Brody and I chatted, though he did mention a little brother he used to go fishing with in Missouri.

Brody's fiancee, Ben, took her moon-walking every weekend. They'd hike across Deimos, find a comfortable crater to lie back in and watch the stars for a few hours. She says they first met on the beaches of Mexico when some of her friends dragged her out of her cave (her garage) to go surfing. She and Ben hated each other in the beginning, but their friends loved hearing them argue so much that they took every opportunity to get them in the same room together.

It's a near-perfect parallel to how we met, isn't it? I told her about how you used to get so angry talking to me your face actually flushed red, then your tongue tied up and you'd try to complete your sentences with those ridiculous hand-gestures, and finally you stopped admitting I was there altogether. I told her all about our nature walks, our skiing trips in Telluride, and all those hilarious and embarrassing anecdotes that you never want me to tell people about. You should've seen Jerry when he heard the "wet underwear" story: we thought he was going to shit himself.

Some things I kept under the rug, so you don't need to worry. I didn't tell them about the first time you saw me cutting myself. I didn't tell them how I had to convince you that it wasn't because of anything you said or did. I didn't say anything about my alcoholism, about the drunken arguments, about rehab, about all the crying. I did tell them you were a saint who always stood up for me, and that I never deserved you.

They said we sounded like a wonderful pair, so when I told them how long it's been since I last saw you, they were naturally shocked. I should've been shocked when I said it. Brody remarked that fourteen months is a long time for a happy husband and wife to be apart, and she's right. You used to be more to me than a bag of intangible memories.

The worst part is knowing you can't read what I'm writing here, no matter how much I pretend otherwise, and that you can't respond to me. I've been wondering what your replies would be; if you would be more honest with me while we're not face-to-face.

—

Ellen,

We restored our optimism today with a new plan that has been in development since last night.

The nuclear plant and the refinery are connected by underground waste repository tunnels, which Dennis used to call the "snot pipes". Employees enter via an air-tight pair of access doors with a decontamination room sandwiched between them (both sectors have north and south access points). Beyond that is a knee-deep river of hot, shimmering green sludge that forms a disgusting rust-colored foam where it touches the walls and could probably dissolve flesh in a matter of seconds. With three envirosuits and my knack with electronic doors, we can use the tunnels to reach the nuclear plant safely.

Of course, we have to make it to the refinery without rousing the cyber-demon's interest. I set out alone to mark every hull breach on our automap so we can plot the safest route later. It only took me a few hours, but my nerve has never been so thoroughly tested. The walls trembled from the beast's patrols and a number of times I had to scramble out of sight as it trudged past, sometimes dodging it by a matter of seconds.

I think remnants of the horde that ravaged this place have returned to Deimos, probably lured back by the scent of fresh meat. Back are the sounds of skittering and snorting and heavy breathing that tortured us all for two days at the beginning of this whole mess; they frequently put me on full alert and forced me to stop working, though the base always appeared as deserted as ever.

We set course for the waste tunnels today. The path has been laid out, but in light of the base's demonic soundtrack our arsenal feels inadequate: three pistols, maybe a hundred rounds, and the plasma gun which I still haven't tested. All other weapons and ammunition are missing from Security HQ, as I feared.

Wish us luck. Hope to get in contact with you soon.

—

Ellen,

I decided to write to you because otherwise I would just sit here thinking about how I may never see you again. A lot has happened since my last entry, none of it good. I've had too many close calls. Rest assured that I'm still in one piece and will be as good as new once I recuperate. Me and Pain are old friends, remember.

We made it as far as the refinery without incident. Our confidence was at a record high, in part due to the silence and the stillness: nothing had disturbed Deimos or us for many hours and we, the fools we were, took it as a good sign.

Things got rough right after we'd passed the refinery security desk. A colony of imps flooded through the open ceiling like cockroaches and stampeded right for us, screeching and howling and flailing their arms in simian fury. We sprinted through the room, trying to keep on our designated path, with Brody leading and me taking up the rear.

Once I was in the doorway I turned one-eighty degrees and squeezed off what I thought was going to be a three-round burst, forgetting I wasn't carrying a conventional weapon until the room suddenly lit up like daylight. The plasma gun's screech drowned out the horde as a white hot beam of plasma cut through their ranks like a blowtorch through butter, blasting thirteen demons into charred smears of protoplasm.

When I cut loose with three more bursts they'd already scattered in terror, the survivors fleeing into the air ducts or back through the ceiling. I took advantage of the lull in their attack and sealed the door behind us. It wasn't the last we saw of the things. They tracked us and intercepted us all the way to the waste tunnel entrance before they finally gave up and left us alone. The skirmish exhausted one of our only two plasma gun batteries — turns out the damn thing is more ammo-hungry than a flamethrower.

But the sight of melting, screaming demons was worth it.

We secured our envirosuit helmets and embarked on the long, stomach-churning walk through the snot pipes. I'd procured us radio headsets from Security HQ, but we didn't have anything to say to each other. We were too scared to make any sound at all: the ceiling trembled over our heads as the cyber-demon resumed its patrol.

"Does it know we're down here?" Brody said. "It can't possibly know, can it?"

It wasn't my first visit to the waste tunnels, and Jerry seemed equally familiar with the dingy atmosphere. Deimos technicians are basically temp agents who get loaned out to whatever department needs them at any given time; I was dragged down there on three separate occasions to rewire something. But you never get used to the place. Being in the snot pipes for any length of time wears on your nerves even when the lights are actually working. Because of the surges Jerry, Brody, and I had to rely on our head-lamps to light the way, and their beams only had a twelve-foot reach in one direction. Blackness swallowed everything else. We could've been walking in the sewers of a long forgotten city in the middle of the night.

The reactor core's waste purging process slowed us down because every five minutes the snot river would rise to waist-level and the current would try to sweep us away unless we planted our feet and braced ourselves. After a varied amount of time — once as long as ten minutes — the current would relax and the river would shrink back down to our shins. Jerry noted aloud that the core was definitely on the fritz if it produced so much excess waste on such a regular basis: normally the tunnels only see a purge a few times a day. No wonder the base is leaking this shit everywhere.

Our path was a straight line all the way to South Access: we came to a three-way junction every block, but the third path always led either to North Access, which was farther from the reactor than South according to the map, or right back to the refinery. But when we finally got to our destination, battered and exhausted from fighting sludge waves, we hit another obstacle.

That door may as well be a wall, because it'll never move again. It's four inches of steel, titanium, and fiberglass, yet something had smashed it inward from our side, and chipped and singed it for good measure.

"The only way to open it now," Jerry said, "is with an acetylene torch." Brody sighed and kicked the door in agreement. We doubled back and took the first right that led to North Access, just in time for another three-minute rush of slime.

Brody noticed something weird shortly after it subsided: a circular alcove in the ceiling, six feet deep and six in diameter. Tunnel shaft, insulation, concrete reinforcement, adjacent circuitry — all had just been melted away to form a useless hole right over our heads. It didn't tunnel up to the surface where demons could get us, so I didn't give it much thought and insisted that we keep moving.

We waded and stopped, waded and stopped for another half hour and came across more alcoves just like the first: eleven was the last count I remember, and every one exactly in the center of the ceiling. Jerry was just fascinated by them to the point where he kept falling behind and had to run to catch up with me and Brody before the next purge.

Something bumped the door just now. I think it's gone.

Jerry stopped us with an urgent call, ignoring us when we urged him to hurry the hell up. "There's something in this one!" he said.

Ignoring the painful creaking in my knee-joints I sloshed back to where Jerry stood staring up at one of the alcoves. Something was nested in it all right, but even with both our head-lamps shining on it we couldn't tell exactly what: a bulb of bruise-colored cauliflower so large that there was only an inch of space between it and the alcove walls on all sides. Brody, sounding tired and frightened, ordered us to get a move on, and the memory of the crushed access door was enough to break whatever interest I had in the thing. The current began to pick up again; I told Jerry we should get going.

It all happened so quickly my mind couldn't absorb it, like water against a rock.

The bulky sphere rotated in place, split into the disembodied jaws of a great white shark, and dropped down right on top of Jerry, clamping over his head and shoulders. His ribcage crackled and popped, bleeding as an orange does when crushed in a man's fist; the thing dragged him soundlessly into the alcove and hovered there, chewing and snorting, staring directly at me with a single green road-flare eye. It seemed to smile horribly at me as Jerry's twitching legs slowly disappeared into its gullet.

Brody heard the terror on my breath and asked what was wrong. I answered with a hysterical wail and gave the alcove a baptism of hot plasma.

The floodgates rumbled and the ensuing sludge rush would have knocked me over if Brody hadn't grabbed and steadied me. We watched the current drag Jerry's half-digested remains into the darkness. The moment the river began to subside again I turned and shoved Brody in the direction of the next junction, and we ran until we thought our legs would break.

Brody was so exhausted when we reached the junction she collapsed in the middle of the intersection. The purge came unexpectedly: she couldn't get back on her feet in time and the current hit her smack in the face and carried her down the refinery-bound shaft to the left. Only clinging to the left corner of the junction saved me from tumbling after her. Her flailing limbs vanished into the darkness and she became only a panicked voice on my headset.

"No! No! Oh God — !"

The current quickly died and then all was silent. In the blackness where she'd disappeared I saw green lights moving in a frenzied dance, one which suddenly rose up to the ceiling and vanished. The others grew steadily larger as they drifted slowly in my direction. My head-lamp's beam reflected off a crooked zipper-line of teeth below the nearest eye. Floating cyclopean sneers were coming to eat me.

God have mercy, Ellen, if only you could have seen them, lurching forward like fleshy asteroids. I opened fire and burst the nearest one in a putrid mess, but my shots lit the tunnel for four blocks and revealed a hundred more right behind it, each one with its horrible eye fixed on me!

My survival instincts took full control and I turned about face and ran so hard even the crashing waves of slime couldn't push me back. I didn't give a single thought to whether I would find the North Access door in the same useless condition as South.

It was unscathed, thankfully, but the security keypad was inoperable because of the goddamn system malfunction. I looked up and down the tunnel and found no trace of the sneering demons' eyes.

While the next snot-wave approached I broke out my screwdriver and removed the keypad's panel to operate the door manually, but so many things hindered what should've been swift and easy work. The slimy current battered me against the doorframe and tried to knock my tools out of my hands. My throat burned so badly I couldn't stop coughing. Tears blinded me and I couldn't remove my helmet to wipe them away.

Most of all, terror and exhaustion threatened me with unconsciousness. I sniveled and sobbed and struggled with the urge to vomit. I couldn't keep my eyes on my work half the time from throwing anxious looks over my shoulder every two seconds. If only those things weren't so quiet! They didn't make any sound at all! At any moment one of them could have been hovering right above my head with its jaws wide open!

The door finally responded; I leapt into the decontamination chamber, pounced on the control panel and dissected it in seconds. Wires crossed; the door sealed shut; the cleaning spouts smothered me with neutralizing foam and a dry-rinse solution. My limbs turned to rubber and have remained that way ever since. I retracted my helmet and promptly fainted.

The bump again. There's no way they can smell me through that door. There's no way.

Can't go on. Need to rest. Will continue later.

—

Ellen,

I tried to sleep but the banging woke me. They've smashed the door just like at South Access. They're gone now, but if they try it again it could give way. My limbs are in too much pain to move an inch.

You came to me in a dream again. They'd cut your hair from your bleeding scalp. They'd taken away your arms and your legs and hooked you to a cold steel crucifix. I heard others — countless others — weeping all around you while your breath came in short, frenzied gasps. Tears gushed from your bulging eyes. There was no Ellen behind them anymore.

The chill, the tortured voices, it all seemed so real. I stood in that very room and watched your pitiful stumps tremble in the cold. I moved closer — like the cameraman on the set of some sick horror film — until our faces were inches apart. Your eyes shot towards me suddenly and filled my blood with ice. I woke up in this tiny cleansing chamber, drenched and shivering, to a vicious banging that flexed the door in its frame. They could be right outside at this very moment, they're so unnaturally quiet.

I can't go on. I can't stop thinking about that awful face, Jerry's legs dangling from its mouth. I can't stop hearing Brody's panicked cries in my ears. I'm too scared to move at all.

A long shard of metal has added to the scars on my left wrist twice in the last few minutes. The pain shot up my arm and anchored me just when I'd begun drifting off to madness. That's what you never understood. It grounds me in reality. It turns my focus from my thirst for booze, and now my irrational fear, toward a different outlet. Attention has nothing to do with it. You even said so for a long time. When did you change your mind, Baby? Was it your mom who converted you? Your brother? Was it your friends or mine?

You wouldn't come with me to Deimos. You didn't just put a wall between us; you put a whole world between us, and I know why. I know you want to give up on me. To give up on us. Maybe you gave up a long time ago, despite how far I've come. This is the first time I've cut myself in three years. I've been sober for two. Too little, too late, I guess.

Well I'll show you, Ellen. I'm not giving up on you. I'm walking through Hell for you. That's something no other man could ever do. I'm walking through Hell for you because your endless encouragement kept me going for so long. I'll be your Orpheus, Baby.

Will write to you again soon. Have to keep moving.

###

 ** **Journal of Unidentified Deimos Scientist****

1

First book all used up. Stopped recording the date because I'm not sure earth time is reliable in this realm.

Hell Patrol was standing over a dead man near North Access today, recently slain. I've seen countless terrible things during my "tour of duty" in the hellish legions, but something about this event still haunts me.

Dead man looked as if he'd walked into a helicopter rotor, remains of his face frozen in a portrait of horror and anguish. His minced corpse was being cradled by a cyborg specimen I've seen and heard many times in the god-forsaken labs of Babel. It used to be a woman. Ghastly metallic appendages. Eyes and hair removed since last I saw her. Something terribly familiar about her voice. She sat on her knees with the technician in her metallic "arms", emitting a long, pitiful moan like a dying dog, rocking awkwardly back and forth as if playing mommy to a broken doll. Got violent when Hell Patrol tried to separate her from her "baby"; they had to subdue her with a stun gun before they could pull the corpse away and strip it of its gear.

Noted the victim's eyes were perfectly human just before they hauled him off to the meat locker. Guards noticed my staring and almost got suspicious. Had to move along. They didn't follow. Mustn't forget to look busy when in the open. Goggles hurt my face from wearing them so much. Badly want to wash this gore off.

Survived for nearly two weeks. Seems miraculous. Perhaps the invasion's mastermind knows I'm not one of its drafted soldiers and wants to see how long I last for amusement's sake.

The dead man had the EMA-300 in his hands and a PDA on his belt. Made note of which storeroom they were taken to. The weapon will give me more security than this shotgun come my day of judgment. The PDA may reveal the victim's identity. Something familiar about his face.

—

2

The Mastermind summoned us again. She has no further use for the Deimos reactor and everything is to be cleared out on the next trip to Babel. Her sudden telepathic messages still catch me off-guard (I'm now without a doubt it is a "she", for only a woman could be as cruel and domineering as this creature, if my mother and ex-wife are anything to go by).

Have not seen her despicable goat-faced minion for many days. I fear the worst for Phobos.

They've opened the gateway to Babel. We leave soon. I'll have to get those things from the storeroom before we go. Deimos belongs to the cyber-demon now.

—

3

Bizarre experience walking through this place. Reminiscent of a Nazi castle trapped in a time rift. Winding brick corridors, mostly unlit; intersections padded with scratched wooden panels and stone pillars. When stepping into the labs the walls become gray and metal, covered in oily green stains. Control panels and machines are stolen from Deimos Base or crudely imitated with hellish materials. Electric cables spill out from behind and snake all over the floor.

Didn't go to the slipgate chamber today, though I'm sure there's nothing new to record in that lab. They never use the device anymore. Demon technicians come in, take it apart, study it, reassemble it, scamper off — so set in their tasks that they never notice me. I can observe them blatantly without fear of blowing my cover, unlike with the ever-watchful security demons.

Have recently noticed an increase in their fanatical devotion to the perfection of their own crude portal-spawning devices. I've only seen one operational set: that which allows us to travel between Deimos and Babel. I dread what use they have in store for the others.

The fiends haven't touched their amplifier since removing it from the slipgate a week ago. Might be capable of returning Deimos to its father planet just as it had snatched it away, but I haven't the time or the labor force to carry it and the slipgate back to the facility.

Need to use it soon before provisions run out. Don't care to take up dining on human flesh. Committed too many sins already just to blend in.

Slept the day away in my usual closet behind a new pile of empty UAC crates. Finally grown accustomed to the screams and howls on the lower floors.

—

4

Food supply in southern storage cell exhausted. Eastern cell has all that's left.

Intercepted by Hell Patrol on my way to get it. My brother-in-law, Barry. Hard to look at him now, after having watched his gruesome possession on the first day. Screamed demon-gibberish at me as he entered the cybernetics labs. Glared at me expectantly like he wanted me to follow.

One cyber-demon's birth had cost numberless failures, and the human ward contains the worst of them. Mastermind must see through my ruse if her pawns summon me to that carnival of unnatural cruelty so often. More half-finished experiments littered the floor, indiscernible from the abortions. Three staggered about unnoticed — jittering, drooling, moaning horribly. One of them pawed my face with its remaining organic hand and sobbed. Took all my fortitude to keep from shivering and weeping.

Barry led me between rows of steel racks displaying disfigured bodies half-flesh and half-machine. Demon scientists struggled to subdue the unhappy specimen who had killed the technician yesterday. The source of her fit seemed to be an awful mechanism being installed in her abdomen.

Scientists ordered Barry and I to hold her still while they finished. She moaned and howled weakly, tossed her head back and forth like a broken wind-up toy. Kept repeating a name, but couldn't articulate as she had no tongue. The name is all she's ever said since she killed that technician. I don't recognize it.

—

5

Accessed the contents of the dead man's PDA, but haven't the time to read it all yet. Surprised to find it belongs to the late Dr. Jackson and not the man who died two days ago. To lay eyes on her writing again filled me with a sad nostalgia.

The reformatting of her hard drive is unfortunate. Without Phobos's coordinates I'm trapped here forever and my records are useless. Provisions won't last more than two weeks at best.

No way around it: I must return to Deimos soon. Dr. Jackson's jump drives are the key. Check her office and her locker.

—

6

I've taken the time to read the technician's records in detail from start to finish. To think there were so many survivors on Deimos after such carnage! So many potential allies! I could have finally abandoned this disgusting costume! The very thought brings me to tears.

Harrison and McCabe I'd known for a long time. It tortured me to imagine them toiling so much over desperate questions to which I already knew the answers. You poor men, if only you'd known how hopeless your situation really was. The evidence was beneath our feet: Deimos is forever anchored at the shores of Hell.

I've stepped out onto the ledge and seen it myself. The most demented of artists couldn't produce such an image: the great black tower of Babel rising out of the squirming, writhing landscape below — the awful bridge between our pathetic little rock and the realm of terror.

The author seemed so hopeful at times. I would gladly trade my soul for that man's ignorance. He wrote of horror with no comprehension of its meaning. Horror is hiding among the damned as one of their own. Horror is sharing in their gristly rituals — executing one's own wounded comrades, butchering the remains as sustenance for their murderers — to keep the fiends' suspicion at bay a while longer.

He never knew true horror until the very end. I wish that poor fool had never known how true his dream visions were - that he never saw what they did to her. A brilliant mind in botany and in literature, ground away to nothing like corn beneath the grindstone. I knew Ellen well enough that I should have recognized her voice in that inhuman laboratory, and what remained of her lovely Greek face. I should have recognized her husband's name all the times she wailed it.

I had wondered why the Mastermind was so elated when the technician died, her psychic laugh filled with savage mirth. It turns my stomach to think back on it.

Ellen is reunited with her husband at long last. I shot her twice in the head so they both could escape this terrible place together. If only my own journey were so easy.

—

7

Gateway to Deimos had not been moved, to my relief. Managed to open it and step through without drawing the guards' attention. Deimos Base reactor core was left running, but it may not last another week without staff to maintain it. Don't plan to be here that long anyway.

Closed the portal behind me to deter anything from following. The entire moon is mine to explore.

Apprehensions about the cyber-demon were extinguished soon after stepping outside: the beast's massive body lay sprawled on its back two hundred feet from the building, arms retracted at the elbows, jaws yawning in rage. Face and chest were speckled with bullet holes, and a thin pillar of gray smoke rose from a charred abdominal wound — cause appeared to be explosive ordnance judging by three fractured lower ribs. Wasn't brave enough to step within arm's reach of the corpse, despite my natural scientist's curiosity. Entered Deimos Base via hull breach in refinery sector.

Changes to the facility are most peculiar. They've become greatly exaggerated since last I visited these sectors. I've never seen the green marble bas-reliefs before, which are indeed all over the facility as the log suggested. The majority of them display a goat-like face that I recognize all too well.

One large bas-relief in the green marble region of the command center depicts a large, round head wearing a strikingly menacing beady-eyed scowl. Facial structure difficult to describe: as far from the concept of "human" as the goat-god face, but perhaps Hell's own equivalent to it. May be a portrait of the Mastermind, herself.

—

8

The blood rivers have overflowed in two areas. Found the moat where Charles was boiled alive. His left arm had clung dearly to the floor panels like a grotesque Halloween decoration, and remained there for days. Current seems to have finally carried it off.

Body count on the rise. Nine charred imp carcasses in the refinery chocked up to my friend the author (the stench was unbelievable). More throughout the facility, probably a total of fifty in the sectors I've visited — many shot while prone, execution style. Three or four slain bull demons among them. Shotgun and bullet casings scattered everywhere, many of them still warm.

Slain UAC personnel that were once on gruesome display have been taken down, laid respectfully on the floor in rows, covered in sheets with arms crossed over their hearts. Has someone been through here other than my friend the author? Perhaps someone from Phobos? I suppose without the Deimos slipgate to receive the signal, the Phobos slipgate would drop the traveler at its last known location.

Search of the residential block fruitless. Dr. Jackson often left her jump drives in her locker absentmindedly. If not there, then on her office bookshelf in the labs.

Thought I heard something just now.

Moving on to Deimos Labs, and whatever horrid memories await me there.

—

9

Someone new has been here all right. Found a spilled satchel on the floor of the command center lobby. Contents as follows: two medical kits, four stimpacks, UAC night-vision visor, half a bottle of painkillers, a handful of 9mm rounds, two cans of military rations.

RPG-7 leaned against lobby chair, with three fully assembled rockets arranged on the cushion. Half-eaten can of rations discarded on the floor, several days stale. Mystery guest seems to have long since abandoned this place, albeit in quite a hurry. He may come back, but I don't intend to wait for him.

—

10

Laboratory now resembles the dungeon of a titanium-reinforced gothic keep. Fluorescent lamps, flickering control panels and UAC security doors seem anachronistic here.

Recovered two UAC jump drives in Dr. Jackson's office and have been sifting through their contents for the last two hours. She did not let me down: the entire project is stored on these little things! Every progress report, every malfunction, every test successful and disastrous, every email correspondence — all have been obsessively filed and organized. She even filed Dr. Hall's project proposal from two years ago!

Found the coordinates for Phobos and Deimos and can consider expedition a success. Desperate for food and rest. I'll return to Babel later. Could use a few hours' peace and quiet.

—

11

Can barely write, in so much pain. A whole day lost! Should be back in the demon labs, conducting my escape; instead I'm bedridden in the east infirmary.

Saw two glowing yellow marbles watching me from behind a ventilation grate in the refinery checkpoint, likely one of the disgusting brown imps that are the placenta of all creation in this world. It crawled out of view before I could sight in on it. Fired through the grate anyway, hoping to scare it off, and the whole block came alive with sounds of movement and pig-like snorting as though I'd awoken a nest of monstrous wild boar.

Lost my composure and panicked. The only light source in that area was a nine-foot-wide hole in the ceiling. The shadows were black and thick and tinted red.

Something exploded against the center of my back, and suddenly I was facedown on the floor with an imp screeching in my ear. I gave it a good shot to the chin with my elbow that must have dazed it. Lost its balance and fell back, banging its head against a wall. I beat its skull in with the plasma gun's stock.

A naval starburst soared right past my head from my flank and exploded against the wall nearby. It towed a rush of scalding air behind it that hit me dead in the face. My eyes welled up and closed by themselves; opened them again just in time to watch an advancing imp wing another starburst into my shoulder. Sprayed plasma fire in the monster's general direction and its head and left arm vaporized.

The heat in the air squeezed my throat shut. My chest and back felt like they'd been raked with millions of tiny needles. The reek of burning flesh filled my nostrils. Deimos shook and rattled. I blacked out.

Woke up in a bad dream. A great, skinless arm with steel claws probed the room, smashing the security desk window and upturning file cabinets. It snatched up the brained demon carcass that lay right next to me and retreated through the hole in the roof. I lost my mind with terror and dragged myself away before it came back. Must have dragged myself for miles without stopping. Pain exhausted my limbs and I blacked out again.

Everything was replaced with bitter cold. Clothes gone, sharp pain biting at my wrists and ankles. Spread eagle position on a metal table. Empty eye sockets gazed down at me and glimmered with those unholy green specks of light that I've seen in the faces of so many possessed Deimos personnel. I felt their fingers cruelly probing around inside me and I'd only begun to realize that they were dissecting me when I woke up on an infirmary bed with no idea how I got there.

Burns on my chest are bad, second-degree. Would be dead if not for the envirosuit. Treated them as best I could on my own: I'm fortunate that most of the infirmary's supplies were still accounted for. Can't hardly move. The pain makes my head swim. No alcohol in the cabinets to numb it. Why didn't I grab the mystery visitor's pills when I had the opportunity?

It's the very same infirmary where Dennis died, according to the log. Comm. deck ten feet away to my left is disassembled, tools scattered on the floor next to it. Blood absolutely everywhere. Of the two exits the one to my right must be where the author saw Patterson for the last time. I hear her whimpering as plain as day. Perhaps it's a ghost.

The cyber-demon is alive and well. I feel its endless vigil through the walls.

May die here.

—

12

Sleep overcame me. Don't know how long. Awoke in a state of confusion, thinking myself back in Babel due to nightmarish moans in the air. When it dawned on me that I was still in the infirmary I fell out of the bed and laid as still as a corpse on the floor behind it. Could not determine the direction of the voice or if its outbursts were mournful, angry, or joyous. It sounded human, and yet…

I remembered the abandoned satchel. Thoughts of losing another potential ally distressed me so much that before I'd realized it I was walking out the infirmary door, clutching the plasma rifle close to me. Made a thorough search of the entire block and found nothing whatever despite the close proximity of the voice.

Grabbed those painkillers while I was out, and the rations. Feeling better physically.

—

13

My neighbor isn't human. I've finally met the death heads my deceased friend wrote about. One roamed the infirmary halls, sniffing me out. I couldn't hit it - like trying to shoot a fly out of the air. Sealed myself in the clean room before it could reach me.

It's still at the window, staring at me. Bumps the glass occasionally, searching for a way inside. Don't know how long I can st

—

14

Must write but no time. Do not forget to recount details on return to Babel. May join you yet, you poor dead fools.

They are coming!

—

15

My victory on Deimos was extraordinary, and perhaps due entirely to luck. But my celebrations are limited to resting long enough to write this. Victory is only the beginning, as they say.

Cyber-demon had torn away two large sections of the hull to get at me, and nearly succeeded too many times. Its footsteps alone threatened to shake the roof down upon my head. Knew my only path to survival was to kill that accursed thing, and immediately set to work.

My elusiveness had put the beast in such a vocal state of rage that its location was easy enough to pinpoint while I scouted the outskirts of the base, searching for a landmark I'd seen previously. Found it on the refinery's west side, only twenty meters from the building: a crater-turned-lake of bubbling industrial waste due to major leaks in several vital sections of the hull. Crater was thirty feet wide and ten feet deep.

Together the refinery and command center arced around this lake in a reversed L-shape. Several windows overlooked the lake, but the small, shattered window of a corner office on the command center's first floor - sixty meters south of the lake's edge and nearly at ground-level with it - also had a good view of the refinery's broad side, all the way to the far north corner. This view suited my intentions, so that is where I stashed the launcher and the three rockets.

Next, went topside and scouted the roof for hull breaches in close proximity to the office. Found three and mapped out the quickest path to it from each. Realm's light gravity rendered harmless what would have been a crippling fall on earth. Returning topside with the EMA-300 in hand, I began my hunt for the beast and found it prowling along the east side of the labs, heading south — and I needed it to go north.

Kept parallel with it on the roof and just a little behind to avoid detection, until adequate cover presented itself in the form of the Deimos Labs solar panels several yards to my right. I got the monster's attention with a burst of plasma fire to the back of the head and darted for the nearest panel.

Didn't make it there because retaliation was quicker than I expected: beast deployed six small drunken missiles two at a time from god-knows-where (metallic portion of its back was indeed lined with circular ports), which swarmed like wasps in my general direction. They soared just over my head and tore apart the solar panel I'd chosen as my shield, raining razor shards of aluminum and silicon down onto the roof. Gatling gun fire pinned me down for awhile. Had to crawl a block away — through the painful remains of the solar panel, cutting myself to ribbons in the process — before I could stand up without fear of having my head shot off. Didn't dare show myself again, but as I sprinted north those thundering hooves followed. The chase was on.

And it lasted only another two minutes. Got careless running atop the access tunnel connecting Deimos Labs to the command center. Should have ducked inside rather than leave myself such an obvious target. A rocket removed the tunnel from beneath my feet with one swift sledgehammer blow. I clung to the lip of the roof, gashing my chin open on the edge as I caught it; my weapon joined the falling debris. The wreath of smoke left by the blast gave me only a few seconds' cover to hoist myself to safety just before a rimshot of bullets hit the side of the building where my legs had dangled. Managed to drag myself through a hole in the roof and stumble my way to the corner office.

I saw the RPG-7 in action during the war and knew how to load and operate it. By the time the beast lumbered around the northwest corner of the refinery my first shot was loaded. Tucked myself into the shadows and put the beast's face in my crosshair, counting down the meters as it drew closer to me. It trotted eagerly along the outer wall, peering in through the windows and the openings in the hull. Brought my finger to the trigger as it began to stomp past the acidic lake.

It stopped suddenly — three meters from the crater — and looked directly at me. Terror seized my limbs, but didn't reach my hands before I squeezed the trigger and sent a hissing white serpent of war out the office window.

It was headed for the cyber-demon's heart. I cursed, realizing I'd missed what I had aimed for. By a stroke of luck the thing raised its artillery piece to shield itself from the attack — the blast tore the creature's left arm off at the elbow, perfectly disarming it!

While it bellowed and flailed, I reloaded, took aim a few degrees lower and fired my second rocket. This one bit into the knee-joint of the cyber-demon's right leg. A living weapon built so tough that a high explosive blast scarcely caused it to stumble; but its left leg was shattered, blown completely away.

The beast teetered for several moments like a building on the verge of collapse...and finally toppled face-first into the crater with a thick, oily splash.

Dragged myself topside again to get a better view from the roof. The crater's noxious contents had set to work instantly: the beast's tough flesh had shrugged off bullets and plasma, but dissolved in the reactor core's toxic byproducts like tissue paper in water. With two limbs gone it was unable to stand up and remained submerged in the horrid stuff, wallowing helplessly and howling in agony.

I'm not a sadist. I took little pleasure in the thing's death. I watched because I realized it was a microcosm: that abomination embodied all the horrors taking place in the laboratories of Babel, and all the evils committed by the denizens of this realm, and whatever wretched purpose it all serves — to watch it curl up and die was somehow spiritually liberating. This wretched collective of primal creatures wants to become something more by building laboratories and slipgates and walking death-machines.

My own goals have been so introverted; my aspirations so narrow in scope. I've joined in these monsters' firing squads, stood by as my brethren were tortured, all just to remain undiscovered. Running away with a handful of documents isn't enough to make up for it.

Far-off voices howled in reply to the cyber-demon, exactly like what I heard in Deimos Labs the previous day. Torch-lights began dotting the landscape, moving slowly through the mist like drunken fireflies. I finished the sorry beast with my final rocket and returned to the infirmary to hastily patch myself up.

Embarking on my new quest to throw a wrench in the Mastermind's rotten machine. Must work fast, for I took the last of my painkillers two hours ago.

—

16

Haven't been at my best performance due to the pain. Most of the creatures haven't noticed, but Barry seemed sharper than the others. He noticed when my knees threatened to buckle; pretending not to hear him snarl at me didn't help matters. He began to follow me.

Perhaps not as sharp as I'd thought. Tested him by weaving in and out of laboratories and turning down corridors at random; sure enough, he was always there, slowly gaining but tailing me stupidly like a dog. Lured him into a secluded area before letting him get within arm's reach, then shot him four times in the solar plexus. Won't matter if his body is found. Shouldn't have ditched my shotgun when I picked up the EMA-300. I'm not much of a marksman with a pistol except up close.

Having to stop and rest too often. Burns are hindering me, but at least I don't have a tail.

Got the welding tools I need. Five more minutes and

—

17

It's done. Only have time for a few notes.

Slipgate lab attended by three shotgun guards, and five demon technicians in the process of disassembling the device again. Walked up behind the two guards closest together and shot them in the head at point blank, one-two. Ensuing firefight was brief: slowed down the third with a salvo of bullets, took up his friend's shotgun and finished him.

Workers exhibited no signs that they were even aware of the shots, and didn't seem to care when I murdered them. Firefight summoned a lone guard from the north corridor, but I sent him back the way he came with a lead handshake: buckshot wad planted in the side of his throat, nearly took his head off.

Only two doors leading out of this lab. Sealed one and welded it shut in under five minutes. No one else came in to check on things, so I did the same to the other door and went to work reassembling the slipgate from memory.

They started pounding on the doors shortly after I'd reattached the amplifier. Doors are rattling in their frames now, flexing inward from one tremendous blow after another. Perhaps creatures like what my late friends confronted in the Deimos waste tunnels. Do not want to ever lay eyes on such nightmares before I die.

Modified slipgate is warming up. Capacitors generating an abnormally large amount of energy. Resulting gateway, if I'm not mistaken, will regurgitate Babel into our world at Deimos's last known coordinates. This tower of blasphemies to science will soon be promoted to the newest moon of Mars, and everything inside will die in the vacuum of space. Control panels smashed, can't be stopped. Pain so great my eyes and nose are running.

Less than a minute to go. Grappling cable and helmet both secured. UAC salvage team will find my body and these records if successful. They'll be through those doors in ten seconds. Only seven shells left, but I'll stall them long enough.

Farewell, Deimos! They're here!

###


	3. 3: Inferno

****Mike MacDee****

 ** **INFERNO****

 ** **A horror novella based on Id Software's DOOM****

 ** **3**** ** **rd**** ** **Edition****

 ** **Special thanks to Steven Johnson, for inspiring me to keep improving.****

 _ _The following transcript was compiled from my emails to colleague Michael Delgado, and the written and audio logs of the ill-fated Inferno Team. All documents have been arranged in chronological order, or my best approximation thereof. In the event of my death or disappearance, this document is to be released to the media outlets listed in the appendix.__

 _ _\- D. Carver__

 ** **MESSAGE FROM:****

 ** **SUBJECT: a small favor****

Greetings and salutations from the malebolge! You're probably wondering why I wasn't present at your bachelor party this past weekend. It would seem what was intended as a simple two-day mineral study has become a week-long sightseeing tour. The team and I were all set to begin our spiral back to earth - the slipgate had vivisected space-time and Private Burns was in the process of stepping into the rift even! - when our good friend Captain Elliot received additional orders from Outpost 9. To be brief, we spent the entire weekend in the desolate nightmare trenches of Inferno, and it looks like we won't be coming home until this Friday at the earliest. I'm sure you're having a good chuckle over that, after my last (admittedly neurotic) letter about my fears that the great bloody fog of this realm was following my team and wishing all the torments of hell upon us. I can't disclose much at present, but our new orders have marched us northeast to a landmark of particular interest to the directors. A last-minute "as long as you're still there" errand to them. The worst sort of overtime to us humble assets.

They're aptly named, descents: after Orpheus's own, which, like ours, resulted in little gain besides a tour of hell's halls. We're lucky to find any new information about this realm's environment (or lack thereof), any specimens living or dead, or any human artifacts of even the slightest importance. I always promise myself I'll never go on another descent again, but I can't seem to say no. Perhaps the optimist in me still believes I'll learn something worthwhile out here.

Ah, my complaints finally bring me back on track. I have a small favor to ask of you, for morbid curiosity's sake more than anything, though it may prove useful later if my little theory is correct. The favor I ask is this: could you possibly locate and email to me any documentation of military operations conducted in the E3 quadrant that used __two__ ATRVs? The after-action report will do, if it still exists. I'm sending you the vehicle serial numbers if it helps. This request may require that you dig up information which is slightly classified, but I'm not entirely sure, and I will need the data regardless. I'd be most grateful to you if you could do this for me.

Hope to see you soon. I'm off to bed. If nothing else, the eerie howling of Inferno's air serves well as a lullaby.

David

 ** **MESSAGE FROM:****

 ** **SUBJECT: RE: document you wanted****

Fantastic, Michael! I'll give this a good read and compare it with what I've found here. If I'm not mistaken, our little bonus excursion has unearthed something of historical importance!

I mentioned a landmark of interest in my last letter. This landmark appears to be the lost Plutonia Labs research facility: there's little left of the place besides charred asphalt and a few crumbling walls. Much of it has collapsed into the chasm by which it perched, taking some of the chasm wall with it on its way down.

As for the ATRV's I mentioned, we found them parked by the slough in worn but operable condition, with an entire portable base setup stored between the two of them - the base accommodates the number of people (6) comprising Inferno Team. The artifact I found at the 'Labs - despite being many miles from the ATRVs - suggests that Inferno Team may have indeed accomplished their mission!

Please tell no one else about this except your lovely director, Vanessa, for the time being. I'll write you again as soon as I finish looking over my treasures. I'll have plenty of time: the marines have little use for me at present.

David

 ** **ORIGINAL MESSAGE FROM :****

Asked Ol' Ed about it and he helped me dig it out of the Pit. Op codenamed "Inferno" from six months ago, supposedly the first organized military insertion into the demon realm. Something of a quiet legend around here with senior staff. First time I seen Ol' Ed without a smile on his face, like remembering the op pulled the drain plug on his soul. Envelope still crisp like it hasn't been touched since filed away. Contains print and digital copy of the report (attached). Didn't read it.

Fill me in when you get back. Got to clean up Tom's mess again (what's new).

###

 ** **After Action Report for Operation: Inferno****

Maj. Carl Urich, US Marine Corps

Filed July 20, 2600

 ** **Date of Execution:****

July 12, 2600

 ** **Sponsors:****

Union Aerospace Corporation

United States Marine Corps

Plutonia Labs (UAC Space Tech Research Sub-Division)

 ** **Classification:****

For Official Use Only

 ** **Scenario:****

Search-and-Retrieve

 ** **Location:****

Uncharted realm codenamed "Inferno"

 ** **Participants:****

United States Marine Corps

Plutonia Labs

 ** **Number of Participants:****

Marines 4

Scientists 2

 ** **Operation Overview****

Plutonia Labs HQ contacted UAC top brass in January of the year 2600 with proposal for device referred to as "quantum accelerator". Purpose of accelerator to detect and seal Inferno portals of any size, preventing further holocausts like those which took place on Phobos and Deimos (caused by similar technology also engineered by Plutonia Labs). Plutonia Labs in dire need of funds as accelerator only existed in blueprint form. Project greenlit by CEO Romero; facility heavily guarded by 2 marine companies during project development.

Working prototype created by February. Chief Engineer Thomas Mohrig emailed video footage of accelerator detecting and closing slipgate portals roughly two meters in diameter. Would know if the device was capable of sealing portals of Infernal origin by the end of the week.

Plutonia Lab subject to demonic assault on February 27, but human casualties minimal thanks to heavily armed security force. Invader portal easily closed by accelerator, allowing only a handful of hellspawn through, which were dispatched by marines. Tremendous victory for humankind. Mohrig promised mass production of quantum accelerators within next few months.

Contact lost with Plutonia Labs on July 3.

Investigation revealed entire Plutonia Labs facility gone, landscape peppered with partially devoured human remains and staggering numbers of demon corpses suggesting invasion of massive scale. Quantum accelerator also lost to the demon hordes.

On July 7, Mohrig discovered wandering beach near Bandon, Oregon. Could not give legible account of what happened to Plutonia Labs and his fellow scientists, nor how he escaped Inferno. Mohrig's health diminished considerably from shock and exhaustion, but was able to oversee development of Infernal Positioning System prototype before finally dying of exhaustion.

Quantum accelerator had been equipped to self-destruct if left unmanned for 48 hours, to guard against this sort of catastrophe; however, reliability of this emergency system in doubt. Device considered weapon of mass destruction in the hands of demon mastermind.

Col. Warren and Dr. Brennan assembled "Inferno" special operations team from ranks of Plutonia Labs and US Marine Corps. Marines and scientists hand-picked for team's ranks based on experience with demonic threat.

Purpose of operation:

1- Enter demon realm and establish a defensible base of operations.

2- Locate and secure Plutonia Labs facility.

3- Recover all data pertaining to quantum accelerator project.

4- Ensure quantum accelerator no longer poses a threat to earth.

5- Erect quantum beacon at Plutonia Labs to mark position for extraction team.

Inferno Team supplied with 1 month's water and rations based on IPS dipper probe readings of drop zone and estimated distance to lost facility. Outpost 3 slipgate portal sustained at 1 cm diameter until time of deployment. Mohrig confirmed previous reports from "Doomed Marine" that Inferno's air is thin but breathable, gravity light but very close to that of earth's moon. Inferno Team members fully outfitted with all-purpose envirosuits modified with kevlar, ceramic plating, lightweight AC units and terrain jumpers. Equipment included grappling guns, demolition charges, M9 Adaptive Combat Rifles, Beretta 9mm pistols, one RPG-7, one "BFG 9000" Adaptive Blast Frequency Cannon, two automated sentry guns, and two all-terrain rovers.

Inferno Team sent through Outpost 3 slipgate on July 12, 2600; slipgate portal returned to first frequency and remained open at 1 cm diameter to allow satellite communication between Inferno Team and Outpost 3, courtesy of UAC cell transmission towers to be erected on other side. Extraction team sent through daily until August 11, failing each time to detect Inferno Team beacon. All members considered MIA, and operation considered failure. Steps now being taken to produce more efficient "descent" missions to combat growing cosmic menace.

###

 ** **MESSAGE FROM:****

 ** **SUBJECT: immediate extraction please****

Michael, I have more favors to ask you, and they are very important. I'm afraid they must also be attended post-haste, before they sever our contact with earth.

The first is that you get us out of Inferno. It seems that, despite our reports that field scout Cpl. Richards is missing in action, and has been for several hours, the directors insist that we continue to explore the ruins of the former Plutonia Labs facility. Captain Elliot declined most vehemently and demanded our extraction, but it appears we are out of luck. The directors want more data, but that may take the sacrifice of several teams at this rate. And I think they know it. In fact, I'm beginning to worry that they intend to abandon us here!

Do not speak to Vanessa. I'm afraid she may be "in bed" with our directors, for lack of a classier phrase. I need you and your friend Major Saunders to get down to Outpost 9 with whatever excuse you can think of and get them to open an earth-portal - we have erected a quantum beacon at our current location, so the portal should appear within a mile radius. If you are my friend and you truly love me you will do this at any cost.

The second favor is that you take what I've found and share it only with the people you trust most, preferably those who are not UAC personnel. It is the contents of the Inferno Team captain's personal log, supplied to us by none other than the "Doomed Marine" whose reputation I needn't review for you. All I can say is it's not quite that "worthwhile something" I had hoped to find here.

Please hurry, for god's sake. If I must die, I'd much prefer to die on earth and not in this dreadful plane of nightmares.

David

###

 ** **Inferno Team Mission Log Transcript****

[Logs Recorded by Inferno Team captain, hereon referred to as "Chief"]

 _ _During the audio log transcripts, sounds overheard in the background are listed in brackets, and compiler's notes__ _ _in italics. Quotation marks indicate discernible spoken words by the Inferno Team members. The names of identified speakers are typed in all-caps.__

AUDIO LOG 1

[Log begins with a sudden burst of sound: commotion of many people running about, speaking to one another very quickly. Keyboards clackity-clack rapidly, trying to keep up. Sounds of occasional laughter nearby, usually from a husky female voice. In the background electric generators hum like whales; gentle rustling and the warbling of birds suggest an outdoor locale.]

 _ _NOTE: Inferno Team's insertion point was Outpost 6 in the jungle outskirts of Tapachula, Chiapas.__

ADAMS: "-sure to keep your ass covered around Ellison, Slim. He ain't been laid all year and he's liable to go caveman."

ELLISON: [snorts] "Thanks, Retch."

ADAMS: "You, too, Olsen. He's desperate."

ELLISON: "One of us ain't gonna survive this field trip."

CHIEF: [clears throat with great baritone voice, then talks aside] "Alright, shaddap!" [moment of silence] "Radio test. Roll call, clockwise. Ladies first."

PARKER: [speaks nervously, like a new intern] "Um, Doctor Michelle Parker of Plutonia Labs Outpost Two-"

CHIEF: "Just names, Slim. Next."

PARKER: "Oh..."

OLSEN: [middle-aged male voice soft as a pillow] "Doctor Joss Olsen."

BORG: [speaks as though carved from granite] "Sergeant Eric Borg! Sir!"

ADAMS: "Private Gretchen Adams, Sirrr-ah! And proud you don't consider me a lady, Sirrr-ah!"

ELLISON: "Private Mitch Ellison, Sirrr-uh!"

[Everyone confirms their radios work.]

CHIEF: "I'd like to welcome you all to the first Anti-Alien Special Forces Squadron. You were chosen for this unit because anyone else from your respective divisions would shit and piss himself with terror at the sight of a death head or a shit-imp. Even Slim, here, knows how to keep her cool around eldritch abominations. The eggheads brought us hell on earth, and it's up to us to show its ugly ass to the door. When we return to earth, we will officially be the baddest mother fuckers who ever lived."

["Hoorah" from Ellison and Adams.]

CHIEF: "Starting right now, you fear no hellspawn. Starting right now, you fear __me__ and __shit else__. Do your jobs, piss when appropriate, and don't make me wish I'd left you at home. Everyone get seated: Adams, Parker, and me in Hobbes; Ellison, Borg, and Olsen in Calvin. Doctors drive to keep the marines' hands free to shoot. Senior marines take the passenger seats. Kids guard from the back seats. Move."

 _ _NOTE: Calvin and Hobbes were the nicknames of the modified ATRV's piloted by Inferno Team: six-wheeled lunar rovers with armored chassis. Both seated up to three people and carried a variety of equipment for navigating treacherous terrain and carrying heavy loads. Hobbes was outfitted with an M397 minigun.__

[New sounds join the ambiance: boots trodding on grass, metallic snaps and clicks of rifles locking and loading, the groan of heavy bodies against leather seats, seat belts whining and snapping into place. Nearby Adams squeals with glee as she checks the heavy steel parts of the minigun mount.]

CHIEF: "Mission log, first entry. The time is nine-forty-four pm, July twelfth, year twenty-six hundred. Inferno Team preparing to embark on voyage into the unknown. Will record-" [to Chief's left comes the metal snap of a seat belt unbuckling, then frantic rustling, then sound of retching] "And we already have a casualty."

[Coughing. Ellison laughs, asks if Dr. Parker is okay. Another cough, embarrassed muttering. More laughter.]

ELLISON: "Some of us're more excited about skippin' 'cross the cosmos than others."

ADAMS: "Reckon so. Doc Olsen got an iron stomach, here. You been to Inferno once, right?"

OLSEN: "Ah...a very brief and very __improvised__ trip while running quantum accelerator tests."

ADAMS: "Regular Allan Quarterman, aintcha?"

[Olsen chuckles. Seat belt buckling as Dr. Parker mumbles.]

PARKER: "-so sorry. I'm okay."

ELLISON: "First time, Sweetheart? Don't worry, we're all virgins."

ADAMS: "Especially Ellison."

CHIEF: [aside] "Try to keep it down when we jump, troops." [to mic] "Inferno Team preparing to embark. Will record progress in audio log for Sweet Home to review on team's return."

ELLISON: [ghastly voice] " _ _If__ they return, that is. Hahahahaaa..."

[Disgusted sigh from Dr. Parker. Brief crackle of radio static, followed by a hard, humorless voice presumably belonging to Colonel Warren.]

WARREN: "Inferno Team, this is Sweet Home again. Final transmission before insertion. How'd the radio check go?"

CHIEF: "Radios are beaut. All equipment loaded and checked twice like Santa Claus. Calvin and Hobbes finally behaving. It was a battery problem after all. Purrin' like pussies now. Should carry us over any terrain without complaint."

WARREN: "Envirosuit report."

CHIEF: "Snug. Nominal. Passed the water test with flyin' colors. Terrain jumpers didn't need adjustment after all. Been climbin' trees like monkeys all morning."

WARREN: "Portable base dry run time."

CHIEF: "Three minutes and seventeen seconds."

WARREN: [wryly] "New record?"

CHIEF: "Best these lazy sonsabitches can do."

WARREN: "Sergeant, armaments report."

BORG: "Sentry guns A-OK. No room for the charges. Hafta leave 'em behind, but no loss. Rifles an' sidearms accounted for and functional."

WARREN: "I assume the Chief brought his bear-killer."

[Snap of a large revolver cylinder locking into place.]

BORG: "Affirmative. He's makin' love to it now. Minigun bathed an' breakfasted an' eager to find some chew toys. BFG faulty: didn't blow up in my hands."

WARREN: "Very funny. The eggheads don't usually worry so much about the grunts using their toys, so show a little respect."

BORG: "Tested BFG again durin' final equipment check. Got the tracker fixed. Now consistently Cajun-grills all targets in range."

ADAMS: "We're also missing one jeep. On an unrelated note."

WARREN: "Roger. All systems are go then. Anyone's having second thoughts, now's the time to opt out."

[Ellison asks Dr. Parker how she feels. Adams giggles like a child.]

CHIEF: "All members ready and willing, Sweet Home."

WARREN: "Okay. We're running behind, so let's make this nice and neat. Stand by."

[One minute of murmuring, buckles fastening, straps whining, metal on metal, chuckling. The generators begin to hum louder, rattling the recorder. Unintelligible words of solace from Dr. Olsen, likely directed at Dr. Parker. A stern order shouted from the distance.]

CHIEF: "Okay. Drivers, start your engines."

TEXT LOG 1

They want me to record my observations during my down time, for my psych evaluation. They're not gonna like most of 'em.

My children have been growing up without me while the Corps keeps extending my tour of duty. Zach is four now and I've only ever seen him through internet video conference. Toni will be in high school before I get back. My wife Sophie cries every time I talk to her now, calls the Corps dirty names. Sometimes directs her insults at me for enlisting in the first place, as if I knew I was gonna see action at all, let alone be stuck fighting in the same useless war for twelve years, followed by several months of guarding Dr Mohrig's crazy ass from small-scale hellspawn invasions.

Sunsabitches finally told me my tour was ending. I was relieved from hellspawn guard duty by some smug young cocksucker and sat on the reserves for a week. Sophie couldn't stop crying and laughing when I told her I was finally coming home, and neither could my dumb ass. I'd booked the next three months with family excursions and alone time with the wife. I was at the goddamn airport, getting on the goddamn plane back to the goddamn USA when they called me with the Inferno Team assignment. They said the guy they originally wanted had died to a suicide bomber with a dozen others. Said it was my last mission for really-real this time. Maybe until the __next__ final mission the UAC cooks up for me.

Sophie hung up on me the last time I called home.

You assholes wanted me to hold nothing back, so that's what you're getting. I shouldn't be here. The Corps took me in the beginning because I was a young smart-ass full of vitality and full of love for the red, white and blue, even though I should've hated Uncle Sam for what he did to my Cherokee ancestors. That young smart-ass has been gone a long time: my trannie's worn out, my suspension's on the verge of snapping, and my oil hasn't been changed since the start of the war. And now you idiots want me to lead a convoy to another goddamn world - one that apparently wants to destroy us. Why not someone younger and not nearly as burnt out? Save your "war hero" bullshit. Heroes don't wake up screaming from dreams of jungles too dark and too thick to tell friend from foe 'til they got their bayonet in your guts.

I always told my marines to leave photos of loved ones at home: they just make you miss and worry and hate. Easier to keep your wits about you when your mind isn't cluttered with distractions. That's why I never used my favorite pics of Sophie and the kids as my PDA wallpaper; never even wanted to see, hear, or think of them except during those rare video calls. Turned out I may as well have brought the family album, because Dr. Parker is a spitting image of Sophie. Her skin's the same medium African-brown, her eyes the same striking hazel. Even wears her hair in the same little ponytail at the base of the neck. Her voice isn't as husky as Sophie's; she sounds more like a teenager. She's younger, too: same age as Adams, early twenties, but __not__ dumb enough to get a face tattoo (Adams has some kinda tribal symbol under her right eye, probably has no clue what the fuck it means).

TL;DR: Next time you wanna throw a squadron ass-first into Hell, pick somebody who wants to go, and don't threaten his pension if he says "No thanks." End of rant.

This place stinks like a crypt in Florida: the air's moist, swampy, and heavy on the lungs, but just barely breathable. There's a thin red mist in the air that coats the distant landscape in a bloody haze, and the sky is eternally overcast, though everything's lit with a perpetual dusk that makes every shadow long and black. We can see traces of green towers peeking outta the "clouds" far above us. Inferno's surface is on the inside of the planet, not the outside. That's what it looks like, anyway. The wind mocks us with the smell of death and the gibbering cries of I don't care what as long as it stays miles away from us.

Calvin and Hobbes got a lot of mileage the moment we "touched down" on Inferno soil. Dipper probe went through the portal ahead of us to check for bogeys: it startled a pack o' shit-imps just on the other side, which started knocking the hell out of it. I gave the go-ahead and we tore ass through the portal, scattered the shit-imps like chaff. We encircled the survivors and corralled them back into a group so Adams could splatter them with Hobbes's minigun. First ten minutes in Hell and the entire front of both rovers is already painted with entrails. Probe's a loss.

Probes. That's another thing. I can understand why a one-way slipgate can't drop us at the same position every time it opens: there's no slipgate on the other end to receive the call (or quantum beacon, which burns out fast and is shit for accuracy), and they don't want the forces of Hell to get their hands on the tech. But if our tech's advanced enough to instantly whisk us to other planets, why can't they make a dipper probe that can take a clear goddamned picture? We'd know exactly where Plutonia Labs is and could head straight for it, without wasting so much time scanning useless terrain.

EDIT: Doc Parker says the red mist in the air and the slipgate portal itself both disrupt radio waves, and it's the lag that messes up the terrain scan quality. The eggheads figured out how to send live feeds back to earth using a cell network: the docs will be erecting a souped-up cell tower every mile or so, and our signals follow the chain of towers all the way back to the open slipgate for earth to receive with relative clarity. Hence why we're doing the scans ourselves in real-time. The more you know.

Our insertion point was a valley in the middle of a grass-less highland of deep brown dirt. The highlands are surrounded by giant black mountains in the far distance, one or two wearing toupees of what could be magma or smoldering red brick. Inferno's concept of "nature" goes to shit from there. The trees dotting the highlands twist and screw toward the sky as if they died in horrible pain, and the trunks are covered in awful barbs. Some ungodly quivering fleshy mass was oozing into the valley from one end like an intestinal flood. We steered clear of it, just in case the flesh-valley it originated from (on the other side of the hills) was alive enough to eat the rovers.

Inferno Positioning System worked perfectly, or as perfectly as the clunky piece of shit can - it's linked to the Outpost computers on earth, so it's about as clear as our radio contact, which is to say "static city." It gives us a rough digital terrain scan, and if you read it right you can make out what's a natural structure versus what's man- or demon-made. Theoretically. And theoretically man-made materials are flagged as the brightest objects, to aid us in locating the Plutonia Labs facility. We're doing a perimeter check on the skirt of the valley, searching the region for any structures that look promising. I dunno how the eggheads figure we're close enough to the facility for the IPS to spot it, but Sweet Home says they know what they're doing, and that it hurts their feelings when their judgment is questioned, so I should shut up.

UPDATE: Perimeter check just expanded to avoid a murder of death heads passing through the valley. IPS flags those for us, too, which is just dandy. Demonic possession is hell on morale, from what I understand.

AUDIO LOG 2

[Boots crunch on soil as Chief walks for several moments, drawing closer to arguing voices: Ellison is recognized first, as he speaks loudly in alarm. Borg's snarls are finally heard after the first discernible words.]

ELLISON: [unintelligible] "-kneelin' like he was gettin' a drink."

BORG: "From a lake o' __boilin' water?__ "

ELLISON: "He was __right there!__ "

BORG: "'Regroup in five minutes' means exactly what it sounds like. You wander off again, you'll be wearin' yer testicles for dog tags. Understand me, Caveman?"

ELLISON: "Yes, Sir! But I'm not makin' it up!"

CHIEF: "What exactly are you not making up, Private?"

ELLISON: "Chief! Sighted someone across the water hole."

BORG: "No humans on this side o' the universe but us, Caveman. The demons don't use zombies 'cept in stolen human settlements."

ELLISON: "He was gone when I got over the hill, Chief, and he wasn't possessed! He was __human!__ "

[Gruff sigh from Borg, then silence for two minutes except for the wind, the occasional grind of boots shifting, and a periodic howl in the far distance. Three steps as Chief presumably moves closer to the lake, then stops. Chief shouts a greeting and waits. There's no reply. He repeats himself, with similar results. Silence for another fifteen seconds.]

CHIEF: "Whatever he is, he's gone now. Load up. Movin' on."

ELLISON: [pauses] "Yes, Chief."

[One minute of nothing but footsteps returning to the rovers.]

PARKER: "What is it, Chief?"

CHIEF: "Ellison discovered a human colony. We asked to speak to their chief, but they were rude bastards, so we shot 'em."

[Adams giggles. Ellison mutters something about a "long fucking trip". Leathery groan as the team members return to their seats.]

PARKER: "Sergeant."

BORG: "Yeah, Slim?"

PARKER: "How do you know zombies are only found in...uh, 'stolen' human settlements?"

ELLISON: "The Doomed Marine said so in one o' his reports. I saw him across the lake just now."

ADAMS: "Get the fuck out! You __saw__ him?"

ELLISON: "In the flesh."

ADAMS: "The fucker's __dead!__ "

PARKER: "Forgive me if I'm a little lost."

BORG: [clears his throat] "The Doomed Marine is a sort of legend among UAC and military personnel. Supposedly he was involved in that shitstorm on Mars last year. He's been livin' here in Inferno ever since. Probably part-demon now from eatin' so much demon steak."

ADAMS: "Ugh..."

PARKER: "This is the first I've heard of him."

BORG: "Don't get outta the lab much, huh, Slim?"

[Muttered confirmation from Parker, laugh from Ellison. Grinding, chuttering hard drive suggests the IPS in use, scanning the landscape around the ATRVs.]

BORG: "Back when that nut Mohrig was developin' the quantum accelerator, the Doomed Marine started tossin' recon reports through the portals, or leavin' em for dipper probes to find. That's how we know about the air, gravity, environmental hazards, demon species, what plants and critters are edible, how to treat the water before drinkin', and everythin' else. He's been quiet for the last two months, so we assumed the demons finally got 'im. Doesn't stop idiots like Caveman from seein' him, though."

ELLISON: "No, Sir."

PARKER: "I can't imagine being stuck in this awful place for that long!"

BORG: "He ain't stuck. They say he stayed of his own accord. Must be like any other war: even when the troops come home, they just wanna go back. Back to what's become familiar to 'em."

CHIEF: "Speak for yourself. Story Time over?"

BORG: "Yes, Chief."

CHIEF: "Sweet Home, this is Inferno Team. Come in, over."

WARREN: [on radio] "This is Sweet Home, Inferno T- [grinding radio static] -head. Over."

CHIEF: "IPS picked up a structure due north of our position. Have the eggheads help confirm whether it's our target. Over."

[Radio silence for a few moments.]

WARREN: "Negative. Does not match scan density level of human structures. Over."

CHIEF: "Well, that's where we're headed anyway. Elevation's high. Might get better readings up there. Over."

WARREN: "Ten-nine, Inferno Team. Got as far as 'elevation high.' Over."

CHIEF: [irritated groan] "I said the high elevation will make the terrain scans worth a shit. We're surrounded by mountains here, and Hell's internet service sucks. Over."

WARREN: "Ten-ten. Proceed with caution. Out."

CHIEF: "Start yer engines, boys and girls. ETA is forty minutes."

ADAMS: "Use yer Indian powers, Chief. The wind'll tell ya where the 'Labs are. I don't wanna eat demon steak!"

CHIEF: "The wind says to tie your dumb white ass to the fender and drag it to our next stop. I'm not gonna listen, 'cos I'm a swell guy."

ADAMS: "Thanks, Chief..."

TEXT LOG 2

We named the structure Hell Keep. It is a small, makeshift fort that twists and tunnels through the middle of the craggy mountain that serves as its foundation. Turns out it's the only way to pass the steep mountain range blocking our progress: we had to drive for an hour along the narrow beach of a boiling ocean to reach it.

The only way in from our side was the courtyard entrance, a house of smoldering red brick poking out of the side of the mountain. The courtyard is about the size of a baseball field and paved with a kind of fleshy soil that turns my stomach to walk on. The front gate is decorated with skulls that are almost human, but not quite. The courtyard was sparsely populated with shit-imps and a couple of floaters. Facing a floater is the worst - the way it seems to grin at you with a mouth like a great white shark, and the way it stares into your soul with that doll-like green eye. The way it swims through the air, flaunting what an unnatural abomination it is. Borg wanted to BFG the horrible things, but I splattered 'em like tomatoes with the minigun to save battery power.

The kids (Adams, Ellison) dispatched the imps with small arms fire, and surprised me with how well they worked together: one would get an imp's attention and draw its fire while the other flanked it and capped it in the head. They went back and forth like that 'til the courtyard was cleared. I was about to commend them when Ellison made some stupid Jurassic Park comment and got Adams giggling again. Maybe they're idiot savants.

From the front gate, the fortress tunnels through the mountain in two directions, and the architect didn't bother paving the craggy walls. We knew the tunnels were just big enough for the rovers (if we removed Hobbes's minigun mount), but we parked them outside and continued on foot to secure the fort: the doctors were behind myself and Ellison, with Borg and Adams taking up the rear. At any sign of bogeys on either side of us, the docs would hug the walls to let the marines through.

We took the right path first, with Ellison taking point, and came to another outdoor courtyard, this one paved with ash-colored gravel. A pack of pink, slobbering bulldog demons was waiting for us there - dumbest creatures that ever lived, next to Ellison and Adams. They just keep coming at you no matter how many pieces you shoot off. Across the courtyard was the door to a long, winding, brick-paved tunnel that led to a sort of ritual room about thirty feet in diameter, with four jade pedestals arranged in a diamond at the center. Another door led out the other side of the mountain, to a lovely view of more damned barren highlands, more damned ugly mountains, and a damned ugly brown river weaving between them.

Human remains were arranged lovingly on the pedestals. One was a bleached skull. I won't go into the rest, except that we cleared them off and buried them in the gravel courtyard.

Sweet Home said the remains could be a sign that we're close to Plutonia Labs. I hope that's the case, and that we'll be going home soon: Parker keeps trying to make conversation with me to ease her nerves, and I can't look at her without thinking of Sophie and the kids and a long vacation in our Colorado cabin. I think I'll assign her to Borg's rover from now on.

The left path from the entrance led back outside, where a crumbling stone bridge curved across a lagoon of murky red death-stench water, to a cave opening in the side of the mountain. We debated whether to risk crossing it. Ellison tapped his foot on the first segment of bridge and heard solid thumps. He smugly assured us it was fine, like he'd just performed a scientific test he was super proud of.

The moment he stepped onto the bridge he fell right through it, ten feet down into the waist-deep mire. For about five minutes we couldn't stop laughing. His dry-heaving and childish whining about the smell made us laugh harder.

Adams, being the lightest and the dumbest of the marines, volunteered to run across the bridge and check the cave. I gave her the okay as long as she came back at the first sign of trouble. She leapt over Ellison's hole and started tearing ass across the bridge like she was in a decathlon, the damned bridge collapsing under her feet at every step. The crazy bitch made it across, but she was going so fast she couldn't slow down before she bumbled right into the cave, out of our sight.

Silence for about one second. Then her voice shrieking a battle cry and her ACR barking on full auto, lighting up the cave entrance with a yellow strobe light. Then out came Adams just as fast as she'd went in, leaping off the cave ledge and into the murk with a thick splash. Three shit-imps came out after her, the first getting shoved into the "water" by his clumsy buddies.

Borg and Ellison laid down heavy suppression fire on the cave entrance while I slogged across the lagoon toward Adams, imp fireballs sailing over my head and scorching my face with hot gusts of air. Meanwhile Adams was duking it out with her shit-imp, punching it and cussing at it like it was one of her brothers - she'd engaged her helmet to protect her face, so maybe she's smarter than I thought.

I put one round between the demon's eyes and dropped it in the murk. Adams's helmet retracted and she whined about my stealing her kills. I told her if she plays with her food, someone else is gonna eat it for her. Maybe she'll go for the kill from now on instead of fucking around and trying to prove herself.

After clearing out the cave, Hell Keep became our new base. It has a fantastic view of the surrounding landscape and our IPS readings are much clearer than when we first landed. We erected our sentry guns at both entrances, and parked the rovers in the gravel courtyard, where we set up our portable base facilities and are now having a barbeque. No joke.

We have a month's rations and water stored in the rovers, but Doc Olsen got visibly excited when he saw those bulldog carcasses, and asked Parker to keep them cold with the fire extinguisher while he set up the skillet. Among Olsen's pet projects is the study of Inferno's animal and plant life, and he'd prepared bulldog once before for a company of hungry marines. His dad was a hunter, so he learned how to clean and cook wild game when he was a kid. It shows, because that crazy viking is one hell of a chef: demon steak ain't as bad as we'd thought, though it's the gamey-est meat I ever tasted.

Adams settled for rations, and adamantly refused to eat with us. The suggestion of eating demon meat made her physically ill. Borg almost ordered her to partake, to discipline her for calling her captain a kill-stealer. Borg never much cared for whiny young recruits.

I guess I don't, either, but I can't be bothered to care anymore.

Doc Parker has been playing with the IPS for the last two hours with nothing noteworthy to report. I'm having Borg relay Parker's reports to me so I don't have to look at her.

AUDIO LOG 3

[Opens with crackling static on the earth radio band and the whine-and-chatter of Hobbes's minigun mount firing in long bursts.]

BORG: [nearby] "-let that shit rain all over the rovers! I just cleaned those things, goddammit!"

ELLISON: [distant, unintelligible]

BORG: "'Cos you're a lousy shot, Caveman! If ya can't hit it, push it back so it don't come within shock range! Those things can zap a grown man dead at ten meters!"

CHIEF: "Ten-nine, Sweet Home. We're sweeping some of the local pigeons off our roof. We got the coordinates, but say that last bit again. Over."

WARREN: [static] "-straightest course to target area is through the slough northwest of your position by about nine kilometers. Should be obvious on the map when it renders: it's where the river seeps into the surrounding landscape. It's the only path across the river within a __hundred__ kilometers. Even then, the marshy terrain might swallow the rovers. Over."

CHIEF: "Did the eggheads just find out they gave us __Some__ -Terrain Roving Vehicles?" [Warren chuckles humorlessly] "We'll walk if we have to. These lazy sunsabitches could use the exercise. Over."

WARREN: "The target of interest is pretty small on our scan, but it's just on the edge of the map. Should see more of it when you cross the slough. Over."

CHIEF: "You're sure it's human this time?"

PARKER: "Your transmission is still rendering, Sweet Home. Please hold."

[Minigun fire for a few moments, Ellison cheering. The IPS grinding away.]

PARKER: "I've marked the area on our map, Sweet Home. It's human, all right. Uh, that is, according to Mohrig's scan key. Scan shows it's white, so that ought to mean earth metals." [pause] "Uh, over."

WARREN: [static] "-having some technical difficulties over here. Contact us again when y-" [long hiss of static] "Proceed with caution. Out."

[Chief grumbles something under his breath.]

ELLISON: "Bogeys splattered, Chief!"

BORG: "And it only took him half a goddamned belt of ammo."

ELLISON: "Aw, c'mon, Sergeant-"

AUDIO LOG 4

[Opens with roaring engines in the foreground, echoing and fading as the ATRVs slowly drive inside the 'Keep. As the engines fade, the background noise becomes apparent: general hustle and bustle of Inferno Team, and a distant chorus of hideous calls that bridge the gap between whale, bird, and ghost.]

CHIEF: [aside] "-moving! Adams, strike that tent in the next ten seconds or I'm leaving you outside! Move it!" [to mic] "Mission log update. Mass migration of death heads in progress, bound for our position. Team and equipment being moved to the altar room until it passes. Assuming they don't already know we're here, they shouldn't notice our presence. Otherwise we may need additional support. More as it develops."

BORG: "Rovers are inside, Chief."

CHIEF: "Good. Help the kids strike the base."

BORG: "Dammit, Adams!"

ADAMS: "I know how ta do it, Sir! The damn thing's stuck on-"

AUDIO LOG 5

[Calls of the migrating death heads still audible, but muffled by the walls of the 'Keep. No other sounds in the background - Inferno Team is quiet, possibly resting.]

PARKER: [softly, nearby] "-think we're being punished?"

CHIEF: [inquisitive grunt] "Say again, Slim."

PARKER: "Do you think God is punishing us? With this...with the invasion. Cashing in all the terrible, selfish things we've done as a species."

CHIEF: [laughs] "I thought scientists were logical people. No room for spiritualism."

PARKER: "We can believe in God and be scientists at the same time. It's not that weird."

CHIEF: "Slim, I've already been punished with endless war for the last twelve years. If that's God's work, I'd sure as hell love to know what I did to piss him off."

[Silence for a minute, then a long sigh from Chief.]

CHIEF: "Fuck it. Forgot what I was gonna say now."

PARKER: "What-? Oh! Oh, you were recor-"

TEXT LOG 3

Even dreams are twisted and ugly here. I couldn't tell you if it was the bloody mist, or the constant howling wind, or the fact that I've been surrounded by nightmare landscape for going on three days.

Tried four times to get to sleep. Every time I went under I'd see two apple-red, snake-like eyes staring into my soul from the darkness - a gaze I can feel physically holding me like it'd wrapped me in chains.

The fourth time I only __felt__ their gaze. What I actually saw was Sophie, naked and writhing in ecstasy as two sweaty men (or man-like __things__ ) crawled all over her, kissing and licking every inch of her. She was young and slim again like Doc Parker.

Ugly things were said last time I talked to Sophie, when she hung up on me. I got furious with her indignant attitude about the Inferno assignment, like I'd done it to fuck with her. I accused her of things, and she hung up. No denial, no argument, just hung up. She couldn't deny it just a little to ease my mind, so I could write it all off as me offending her with my lack of faith.

Maybe she wanted my doubts to needle me. Except she knows it would distract me, and that a distracted marine is a very bad thing. Or maybe she doesn't know, or just doesn't care. Maybe after twelve years she can live without me just fine.

I don't need this shit muddling my brain.

AUDIO LOG 6

[Opens with the roaring ATRV engines and occasional chatter between the marines and doctors.]

ADAMS: [Sings an unidentified country song, her voice shaking from the bumpy ride.]

WARREN: "We read you, Inferno Team. Go ahead. Over."

CHIEF: "We've descended the mountain on the morning of Day Four, after the last trace of death head migration was off our radar. Now heading northwest to the slough. Over."

[Whirring wheels and squealing Adams as Hobbes goes briefly airborne, then touches ground again with a rough thud.]

ADAMS: "I think I like Olsen's driving better, Chief!"

CHIEF: "Try to avoid the Dukes o' Hazzard Stunt Course route from now on, Doc."

OLSEN: [laughing] "Sorry, Chief."

CHIEF: "Crazy-ass viking."

[Adams resumes singing.]

WARREN: "Drive safe, Inferno Team. Check in again when you reach the slough. Out."

TEXT LOG 4

Taking five to rest. Everyone's a little shaken after our last encounter.

IPS can track the energy signature of a death head, which is why it can tell us whenever they're in our vicinity. It can't do the same for __fleshy__ hellspawn types. A herd of bulldogs, for example.

We were traveling single-file with Hobbes in front. The rovers clock in at 80 mph so we were making good time when we came to the hill. Hobbes went right up the hill with no trouble, and came down the other side...right in the midst of fifty bulldogs, if I had to hazard a guess. Adams and I immediately opened up on them, parting the herd like Moses. Calvin came through behind us as it started to close up again - came out of the herd with three bulldogs clinging to the rear fender and the other forty-seven hot on its tail, snarling and slavering.

Bastards were only half as fast as the rovers, but the terrain got disagreeable at that point: we'd get about a block ahead of the stampede, then they were drooling on our tires again as we slowed down to make a turn or dodge around a fallen tree, or else risk rolling the rovers. A pack of shit-imps must've spotted us from the top of the hills because now and then starbursts would sail over our heads or explode against the chassis. I sighted one long enough to put a trilogy of lead into one of its arteries, but the rest vanished too quick.

Then over my right shoulder came a bang so loud I could feel it shove the rover as if hurrying us along; looked behind us just in time to see a rainstorm of demon giblets and a black mushroom cloud rising into the air. In Calvin's backseat I saw Ellison loading the RPG-7 with another rocket. The herd was down to about thirty strong and a couple of them were starting to wise up, turn tail and run. The second rocket scattered the herd long enough for us to put three blocks between us and them.

Naturally that's when we came to the steep incline and fucked ourselves.

Hobbes went down at an angle, skidding down the hill in a dust storm of ash-colored soil; we hit the bottom sideways and rolled. I may have blacked out, and my lungs had collapsed and left me coughing, my nostrils choked with a soiled ash scent. Olsen was conscious but in shock, staring at the steering wheel. Took me what felt like an hour to realize Hobbes was lying on its side (my side specifically), and Adams and the minigun were gone. When we heard Calvin's engine roaring down the incline and the snarling herd not far behind it, me and Olsen both scrambled to unfasten our belts. I'd expected Olsen to be whining or trembling, but he's fit and tough for an egghead - he bounded out of that rover as if he rolled them all the time back home.

I know what happened next, but the order of events is foggy. I remember Calvin landed better than we did (on all fours, ironically __unlike__ the one we'd named after the cat), and Parker expertly skidded into a J-turn behind the crashed Hobbes. I remember Ellison helping me and Olsen to upright Hobbes as fast as we could, soiling our envirosuits with terror as the herd's snarls grew deafening.

I remember spotting the minigun turret half-buried in a pile of ash gravel twenty-five feet away, with the barrels pointing toward the direction of the herd, which we could still hear but didn't yet see.

I remember watching Adams - on her back about fifteen feet from the turret - wrestle with a stray bulldog that had approached us from behind, before drawing her sidearm and putting four bullets in its throat.

I remember seeing Borg jump out of Calvin with the BFG 9000 in his arms - damned thing looks like an M60 machine gun with a white air conditioning unit in place of the barrel, covered in vents and glowing green on the inside like a fancy computer tower. I remember wondering how it could be a real weapon and not a prop made by somebody's kids, even after having used one myself. I remember wondering how Borg could configure it with inhumanly steady hands while mine were already shaking so badly that a revolver reload was out of the question.

Borg's the best man I ever served with. The thought of losing him turns my stomach sideways. He seemed disappointed when I ordered him to hand over the weapon and move the team behind the blast zone. The herd was just coming over the top of the incline when I locked the BFG's gyro-mount arm over my right shoulder and switched it from "pulse" to "overdrive."

I took three paces back from the base of the incline and waited for the rovers to get about a block away; waited for the first row of the bulldog legion to touch down at my level before I squeezed the trigger.

They got two steps closer while the weapon hummed, building up its charge and marking every human-sized target in its line of sight. Then it sneezed out a small green supernova that vaporized the bulldog immediately in front of me - blasting it to a ghastly cloud of red vapor - before branching out into a forty-tentacled electric horror. The tendrils thrashed into the herd's ranks and deep-fried any living thing they touched like I'd just opened the Arc of the Covenant on them. Most of the dumb animals were reduced to blackened, crumbling husks before their comrades realized what'd happened; by the time they did, there was only seven of them left standing.

I chucked the BFG and finished six of them with my bear killer - loaded with magnum hollow points that didn't leave much of their skulls behind. The last one scrambled back up the incline and just made it to the top before Borg chopped it down with his ACR.

No casualties on our end, though Adams is pretty banged up: she'd used her terrain-jumpers to fly clear of the rover at the last second, and came away with a dislocated left shoulder and five stitches for the gash on her forehead. The docs unloaded a stimpack on her, so she should heal up pretty quick - at least long enough to last the rest of the mission. She'll crash hard when that shit wears off.

I scolded Doc Parker for reaching for the "berserk" pack first, almost wasting it on non-lethal injuries. Adams is energetic enough as it is.

Turret mount is a loss, but the minigun is still functional. Borg configured it for infantry use: swapped for the short barrels and a double-drum magazine. It's his now, to make up for my stealing his BFG glory.

Glory. Guess that's why the idiots back home feed me that "war hero" bullshit: all the times I put my head in the lion's mouth to keep my troops from being swallowed. My last military psychologist said I have a death wish, which is moronic: I wanna live to see my kids again more than anything. Maybe I'm always trying to do my troops a favor, knowing they got families to miss, too.

We set up camp on the edge of the slough just a few minutes ago. The rancid brown river dies off here and bleeds into a soggy spread of marshland several miles across at the skinniest point. The barbed "agony trees" are thick here, standing on their roots at about thirty feet tall, and even uglier when they got vegetation: olive green ropes of moss dangle from the boughs and into the water like jellyfish tentacles. The boughs are thick with mossy tufts: anything could be watching us from up there and we wouldn't be able to see it 'til it dropped onto our heads.

We're waiting for the IPS scan to show a larger picture of the target area before we go slogging across.

AUDIO LOG 7

PARKER: "-just rendered now. Sweet Home, this is Inferno Team. Do you read? Over."

WARREN: "Loud 'n clear, Inferno Team. Go ahead. Over."

PARKER: "Are you looking at the target area now? Over."

[Silence for ten seconds.]

PARKER: "Sweet Home, are you there?"

WARREN: "Yes, we're here. We've steered you wrong, it looks like. That area is too small and scattered to be Plutonia Labs. Possible software corruption. The eggheads are trying to fix it at present. I advise you plot a new course and not risk losing the rovers. Over."

[Background noise: ATRV engine straining itself, the tires grinding against swamp mud. Borg is yelling instructions at Olsen.]

CHIEF: "Thanks anyway, Sweet Home. Hobbes is currently stuck in the mire at the shallowest point we could find. Looks like we'll be wading across on foot. Over."

WARREN: "Negative. Alter course and head due east. Contact us again in an hour. Out."

PARKER: "Wait, Sweet Home. This can't be a glitch in the software: it's showing earth materials beyond a doubt. The pattern suggests...It __looks__ like a __campsite__."

CHIEF: [scoffs] "Slim, Plutonia Labs didn't have any portable base units, and there've been no organized expeditions before us."

PARKER: "Look for yourself, Chief. That is a campsite, I'm sure of it. Or __former__ campsite." [to mic] "Whether or not it's Plutonia Labs, we should investigate anyway. Over."

[Radio silence for another minute as the ATRV whines away in the background. Chief and Parker mumble to each other, Chief in affirmation.]

CHIEF: "Sweet Home, she could be right. If the outer masses are tents, they're arranged defensively. The largest mass could be an ATRV tilted at an angle. Confirm, over."

[Radio silence. Chief repeats himself; gives up after a full minute of no reply, grumbling about "bargain-bin tech." Parker's voice fades into background as she continues calling Sweet Home.]

CHIEF: [shouting] "Ellison! Adams! Bring Calvin up to the edge and hook the winch to Hobbes's rear fender."

[Two minutes of ATRV noise: Calvin adds his engine to the mix as it draws closer and idly purrs. Parker shouts for Chief from a short distance away.]

CHIEF: "Put 'im in reverse and get ready to drag Hobbes outta that muck. Wait 'til Ellison gives you the signal before you start backing up. Don't need both o' you idiots eating all our stimpacks."

ADAMS: "You can have 'em, Chief. They go straight to my hips. Aheheh."

[Parker shouts louder, her voice shaking in alarm. Ten seconds of moist boot-steps as Chief swiftly approaches her.]

PARKER: [much closer now, mumbling too low for the mic to hear]

CHIEF: "They'll find out sooner or later, whatever the problem is. Calm down and speak clearly."

PARKER: "They cut me off."

CHIEF: [silent for a moment] "Whaddaya mean?"

PARKER: "Look at the IPS!"

CHIEF: "I see the damn IPS, Slim. Fix it if it's on the fritz."

PARKER: [voice trembling] "I can't fix what isn't broken, Chief! The IPS is fine! There's just no signal! They've closed the slipgate! We have __no contact__ withearth!"

[Ellison shouts an exclamation in the distance, and the ATRVs go silent. The background noise is filled with sloshing as the rest of the team assembles around Parker's station.]

CHIEF: "Calm down, Slim. They've been having tech issues since the start of this op. They could be doing maintenance."

PARKER: "They would've said something about a shutdown for maintenance! or told me to stand by, or __something!__ "

ADAMS: "What's up, now?"

CHIEF: "Technical issues on earth. Nothing new."

ELLISON: "We __lost contact?__ "

CHIEF: "That's enough. Slipgate goes offline and within seconds all o' you start acting like sniveling children!"

PARKER: "They have no reason to shut down the-!"

CHIEF: "Quiet! That's an order!"

[Everyone is silent for several moments. Someone sniffles.]

BORG: "Move forward, Chief? Or back to Hell Keep?"

CHIEF: "One thing at a time. You grunts get back to work un-stuck'ing my RV and let __us__ worry about slipgate-related mishaps." [a beat] " _ _Move!__ "

TEXT LOG 5

We're giving Sweet Home another hour to reconnect before we head out on our own, toward the "campsite." We struck our portable base and hid the rovers under a sheet of vegetation, to reduce the chances we'll be spotted from the air. The kids, and even Borg (though he seems unaware of it), jump at the slightest howl in the air now. Doc Olsen is a weird egghead: sharpening that serrated cleaning knife of his, humming some old tune to himself when he isn't telling the other marines about life in Oslo. Could be his way of calming his nerves; could be he isn't bothered at all by being on this godawful planet.

Don't much feel like talking lately, so I'll probably stick to the written log for awhile. I'm afraid if I get to talking, I'll start talking about the family, or those damned red eyes that watch me in my dreams.

Doc Parker doesn't talk much, either. She sits with her chin on her knees, staring out into the swamp with moist, foggy eyes. Nothing I say eases her mind. Could just as well have come with Sophie - she shuts me out, too, when she's upset about the tiniest things. The eggheads take down the slipgate for maintenance and she thinks it's the end of the goddamned world.

I'll give Col. Warren an earful next time I talk to him, though. I served with him; he knows better than to leave his troops hanging with no warning. We better get some kind of hazard pay after this.

TEXT LOG 6

Still in "earth blackout." Gearing up and moving out. Everyone's carrying a few days' food and water with their standard gear, and Parker's carrying one of the sentry guns. We left the camping gear with the rovers - we'll sleep in shifts under the crimson sky for the time being. Borg looks like an action movie hero: minigun in his hands, BFG slung over his back.

Wind isn't howling at us. Taking it as a good omen.

AUDIO LOG 8

[Opens on chaos: splashing and sloshing of swamp water and the voices of Inferno Team yelling and babbling over each other while Olsen howls and snarls in agony.]

CHIEF: "-dammit, hold him steady!"

BORG: "Gimme the bullet, Slim. Privates, quit fuckin' around and __hold__ him!"

ELLISON: "He's __strong__ , Sir-!"

BORG: "Bite down on this, Doc. Easy does it..."

CHIEF: "Hurry up with that goddamned shot, Slim!"

PARKER: "I'm __not__ giving him a full dose! The wound isn't severe enough! It's __too dangerous!__ "

CHIEF: "Maybe you got all the time in Hell to argue, but the rest of us don't! The rest of us came here to do a job, and I won't have any member of this team slowing us up! Give him the shot! That's a goddamned order!"

BORG: "Ow! Ow! Give it to him already! He's biting-!" [Borg joins Olsen's pain-wracked snarls]

PARKER: "Chief, he could go into cardiac arrest. And if not, once the withdrawal sets in-"

CHIEF: "You listen to me, Doctor: either you give him the shot or I cap him and leave him right here!"

[Parker is silent a moment, then mutters confirmation. Olsen's snarls begin to calm slightly.]

CHIEF: "Dammit, Olsen, quit hittin' my microph-"

TEXT LOG 7

I hate this planet.

Not because of the ugly, dangerous environment, or the ugly, dangerous natives, or the stench in the air that seems to grow new layers every day we spend on this horrible rock - though none of those points help brighten my opinion of the place.

It's the "awareness" of Inferno that I hate most. I can't think of a better word for it. It watches us while we sleep. It invades our dreams, especially mine: taunting me with images of Sophie and the children. And everywhere we go, the planet always seems to know where we're going, and moves every nearby hazard right in our path. The tomato-eyes seem angrier every time I see them, like the planet is mad that it hasn't killed us yet.

Borg took point and we waded through the marsh single-file, again with the docs in the middle. The shit-water of the slough came to the middle of our thighs at the shallowest, and the red mist in the air tinted it to look like fresh blood. We waded for an hour before we found ourselves in the heart of the marshland, where the trees were so numerous and so dense (some of them twisted obscenely together like nightmarish dancers) that they formed a sort of maze curtained with dangling vines. Borg had to cut a path through the vines with his machete in several areas; even then, between the vines, the red mist, and the dim light due to the thickness of the boughs overhead, it was easy to get lost. The vines seemed to grow back the minute we turned away.

Several whispered arguments were had over which direction we were headed - everyone thought they recognized a helpful landmark that proved them right. Borg finally started hacking roman numerals into the tree trunks, and that helped us get back on track, but we lost a half-hour walking in circles.

The only sounds were the murmur of the blood-water as we waded to our destination, and the usual howls from far away. Ghostly jungle sounds echoed in the back of my mind - chirps and caws of birds, buzzes and clicks of bugs, rustling in the trees overhead - as if to correct the dead calmness of the slough. __Jungles and swamps don't sound like this. They're teeming with life. Filthy with it. Obscene with it. There's no life here.__ I'm not sure why it bothered me so much, to the point where my heart was kicking me in the throat and the chatter of dead soldiers from old earth battles faded in and out of the air - guys I'd fought with in proper jungles and proper swamps not filled with blood-red mist. My brain was trying to configure unnatural things to make them more natural and it just made it harder for me to breathe. Stupid thing to panic about. Perfect time to panic about it.

Borg stopped and held up his hand with a clenched fist. Everyone halted and waited quietly while my sergeant stared out into the marsh, at the shotgun scatter of trees ahead of us. He stood perfectly still, staring, for about a minute. We did the same.

Finally I moved up to the front of the line and asked what the trouble was.

"Chatter," he said. "Straight ahead."

"Human?" I said, damning my voice for shaking slightly.

Borg said he wasn't sure, but it was dead ahead and moving toward us. The marsh before us was as lifeless as ever, but there were ripples in the water less than fifty yards ahead - the extra-damp air thickened the mist into a solid red wall beyond that point, so we couldn't make out what the disturbance was.

I ordered everyone to disperse in threes, seal their helmets, and get eye-deep in the water under the tree clusters northeast and northwest of where Borg stood - the clusters were fifteen feet apart and draped enough in vines to conceal our heads completely. The envirosuits were air-tight once sealed, and allowed us to talk freely via radio band without being heard.

Ellison and Olsen were with me at the left tree cluster; Borg took the girls to the right cluster. Everyone was in position and submerged within ten seconds. Another twelve seconds passed before the shapes materialized in the distance.

The green, burning eye sockets appeared in the mist first; one pair, then three, then five by the time the first two were close enough to identify as former humans armed with Winchester shotguns, their envirosuit helmets off, their mouths and breastplates smeared brown-red with old blood, probably from the last people they'd cannibalized. They were scanning the marsh as they approached us in a disorganized group - Borg observed that the two on the outside were armed with ACRs.

Parker chimed in: "Sergeant, I thought you said former humans were only stationed at stolen human settlements."

"Well, these ones aren't," I said. "The ACRs are top priority: they'll shred us at this distance. The shotguns won't be a problem if we keep outta close range."

The shotgunners were moving at a sluggish pace: their path was taking them between our tree clusters. The ACR zombies were breaking off from the squad and spreading out, falling behind the shotgunners by five paces and circling around our hiding places, unwittingly flanking us.

If any one of them noticed us, we'd have nowhere to go for cover - they'd cut us all to ribbons.

I had trouble talking for a moment, trying to force words out of a dry, narrow throat. "Senior marines take the ACRs quietly after they pass. Then I'll give the word for the kids to drop the three duck-hunters. Give Ellison the minigun. Drop 'em before they turn around."

Borg muttered a curse, probably because he's been itching to use the big guns himself since Day One. I shouldered my ACR and got my combat knife ready, moving slowly and gator-like to the outside of my cluster until I saw my ACR zombie, slogging in my general direction thirty feet away. In life he'd been a jarhead of Ellison's age: twenty-odd years, white, broad-shouldered, wide jowls. "Martel" branded on his breastplate. I made a note to look him up when we get back to earth, after I finish shining my boots on Col. Warren's asshole.

Twenty feet away he reminded me of the young guys whose chatter I kept hearing in the air - my war memories leaking out of my head. My throat closed tight and cut all the air off.

Ten feet away - and that's as close as he ever came - I got a good look at his profile and remembered an enemy soldier with similar nose and lips, roughly the same age. I'd killed him the same way in a slightly drier climate. I remembered how he'd shuddered and whimpered as he died in my arms, covering me in the smell of his shit.

"Tango down," said Borg. Hadn't heard anything before that apart from the zombies sloshing past - the first ACR zombie was down and nobody missed him.

My zombie had passed me by three paces. I tried to slither out of my hiding place, to position myself behind him.

My brain sent all the commands, but nothing moved. I just stared at the demon as it walked further away, now fifteen feet, still alive, still fully armed. I was vaguely aware that someone, maybe Olsen, was speaking to me on the radio. It did jack shit: my every muscle was made of concrete. I was a useless statue squatting in the murk, wishing to god my dead squad mates would stop talking to me from the past.

The shotgunners had halted and were chattering in demon-gibberish. They must've finally noticed the water wasn't as calm as it ought to be. Stupid easy kills, all of them, and I was blowing our chance at surprise.

A helmet drifted out from somewhere behind me, making a b-line for my quarry. Doc Olsen - spent his goddamned childhood catching and killing game in the woods - rose out of the water behind the ACR zombie without making a sound, his serrated cleaning knife in his right hand.

But he's a hunter, not a marine. He grabbed him sloppy. There was a grunt, and loud sloshing, and then the shotgunners were spinning around with their barrels up as they spread apart from each other.

The slough erupted into a flashing, banging rave as Borg, Ellison and Adams opened fire on the shotgunners. I saw one jitter and go down in the corner of my eye while the other two scattered. Olsen's zombie had dropped his ACR and broken away from him: he was spinning around with his sidearm in his hand and Olsen's knife buried in his gouting neck, gurgling furious demon gibberish at him. My muscles only started working again after the sonofabitch put two slugs in Olsen's gut. Then I sprung out from the vines like a monkey, bringing my blazing ARC up and cutting a bloody line across the zombie's chest. He fired two more shots into the water before he collapsed.

Sloppy fucking burnout, that's what I am. My eyes went to the staggering, bleeding Olsen and not where they should've gone: to the bogey ahead of me, next to the tree, who put a buckshot wad square into my breastplate and knocked me back against a cheese-grater tree trunk - didn't penetrate, but felt like I'd been kicked by a mule.

He'd accidentally saved me from the floater that'd come through the treetops over my head, which was now bobbing for humans in the mire within kicking distance in front of me. Up close it was a six-foot-wide ball of blood-red cauliflower. Never let one get that close before. I staggered backward around the tree as the floater flopped around in the water, biting stupidly at nothing. Dropped my ACR, drew my sidearm and put the tree between me and the shotgunner who was still firing at me, peppering the trunk with buckshot. I put three baseball-sized holes in the floater's side, and two more through its face when it rolled over to hiss at me.

The shotgunner was reloading when an invisible chainsaw ate through his cover and perforated his torso - Ellison putting the minigun to work. When the zombie staggered into the open I removed his head with the last of my hollow points, leaving only the bottom jaw behind. Hands shook too badly for a reload, so I holstered it and fished my ACR out of the murk and reloaded it.

Olsen was leaning against a tree, bleeding badly from his midsection. I shouted for Parker to help him and two more goddamned floaters responded, descending from above the trees - the second one grinned right at me, and a face-full of lead didn't stop it from yawning wide and spitting a bolt of lightning over my head, blowing the tree closest to me in half. Parker narrowly dragged Olsen out of the trunk's path as its toppled and crashed into the water. Two more bursts from the minigun painted the surrounding trees in purple floater guts. Ellison's aim had improved damned fast.

We gathered around Olsen with our sights pointed skyward, watching the shadows dancing in the tree boughs - we got a rare glimpse of a floater's bloated body hovering past the gaps in the treetops, but couldn't determine their numbers. Parker stabilize Olsen enough to move him, but he was already dead-pale from blood loss and groaning in agony as his endorphins wore off.

They always remove the bullets in the movies. That's because Hollywood writers are morons who want their heroes to bleed to death.

I don't remember how long we waited for the shadows to stop moving up there. The damn bloated things are so quiet, unlike the death heads - if we hadn't seen their dead green doll-eyes peeking down through the boughs for a glimpse of us, we wouldn't know they were there at all. Necessity soon demanded we risk moving forward, floaters or no, with Parker and Ellison acting as Olsen's crutches.

It got to be too much for him, and we were making terrible time with him slowing us down, so we had to stop again and stitch him up on the spot. I ordered him a "berserk" shot to speed up his healing - full dose, against Doc Parker's protests. Thirty minutes later the bleeding stopped, and he'd healed enough to keep up with us.

Once we were on dry land and at least a mile away from the scene of the skirmish, we looked back and saw a crimson tornado slowly forming above the slough, towering over a mile into the bloody sky. It funneled down through the trees and into the general area where we'd fought the former humans, but somehow didn't uproot the trees - it barely made them sway, in fact. I'll never forget the sight of that godawful storm for as long as I live, and all because I was stupid enough to use the rangefinder to get a closer look at it.

Red floater-demons tend to resemble a tornado when they number in the trillions, and circle a food source like buzzards.

We traveled until we couldn't see any trace of the "storm." We're now parked on a hill with a scenic view of an ugly canyon instead. It's quiet here, and it's dry. Doc Parker says (if memory serves) our mystery campsite is just over the mountain northwest of us.

Parker isn't speaking to me at all at this point, on account of my "berserk" stimulant prescription, but given a choice of "dead" and "crazy," Olsen seems satisfied with "crazy." He's a bundle of energy now: laughs at nothing in particular and can't seem to sit still for three seconds. Exaggerates his every movement and gesture to burn it off. He ate like a horse tonight, and our rations won't support his new calorie intake. But he promises to cook up some demon steak for us later. He's earned an extra helping at dinner anyhow. Being a soldier when I couldn't.

UPDATE: Borg asked about my freeze-up. I was dodgy answering. I don't know what to say to him. Olsen won't spill a word of it to anyone - claims he doesn't remember what happened. Then he gives me this knowing look when the subject changes.

UPDATE 2: Now Adams claims to have seen the Doomed Marine, watching us with a viewfinder from a mountaintop. If it's true, why's the asshole so shy?

AUDIO LOG 9

[Opens to occasional crunching of boots on soil, Ellison and Borg muttering to each other too far away for the mic to pick up. Adams sings halfheartedly to herself somewhere nearby.]

OLSEN: [breathing unsteadily, voice shaking slightly] "-few weeks old, I would guess."

CHIEF: "Date's the same as ours."

OLSEN: "Ah...yeah, yeah it is. From the same batch, no doubt."

CHIEF: "It's just damned weird...You feeling all right, Doc?"

OLSEN: [giddy sigh, clears throat] "Ah...I don't know yet. Might just be crashing finally. Feel wiped."

[Clink of a tin can bouncing down a mountainside. Two dull pats, likely Chief's hand on Olsen's shoulder. Boots crunching for several seconds as Chief approaches Borg and Ellison, who stop talking just as they're close enough to the mic to hear.]

CHIEF: "Anything?"

BORG: [exasperated sigh] "Yeah, we got the serial number. In fact, we got whatever we need to confirm whose rover this is, and when it was sent here, and why...but unless Sweet Home gets in touch with us again, I dunno who we're gonna ask."

CHIEF: [bitter laugh] "Maybe our Doomed Marine knows. Ask him in sign language next time one o' you catches him spying on us."

ELLISON: "It's been stripped bare, Chief. Could maybe borrow some parts from our rovers and carry 'em back here. Then me 'n Adams could get this crate moving again in an hour or two."

CHIEF: "Not if that demon tornado is still there. I'll think it over. Everyone get some rest in the meantime. We got some nice shade here anyway."

PARKER: "Adams and Ellison might be right, Chief. The 'Marine must've left this stuff for us."

CHIEF: "If that loon was still alive, he'd have made contact with us. He'd team up with us and help accomplish our mission. He'd do more than leave us Secret Santa packages, I know __that__ much." [silence as no one argues] "Slim, see what you can do for Olsen."

TEXT LOG 8

Four tents: two shredded to bits, two sliced open but usable, all four browned with old bloodstains. The ATRV was stripped for parts, including the battery. No bodies anywhere. In contrast to the devastation, a neat bundle of rations, water, medical supplies, and two bed rolls was waiting for us right in the middle of the campsite - the general consensus is that they're courtesy of the Doomed Marine. Don't know if he's the one who looted the camp, but whatever wiped it out won't be coming back. Nothing to come back for.

The camp ruins sit on a cliff extending off the side of an ash-black mountain. A tripod (for what, I don't know) is perched on the cliff edge; over the edge there's a long, steep incline littered with empty ration cans and a few water bottles, with a house-sized blood-red pond at the very bottom. The view is about as pleasant as it gets around here: black mesas tower on the horizon, shrouded in the red mist I've grown accustomed to.

There's nothing here to indicate who this camp belonged to or what they were doing here. The expiration date on the cans is the same as ours; the scraps inside rock-hard, several weeks stale.

Whoever camped here was an organized military team. It's a Marine Corps portable base. The ATRV is Marine Corps issue. And they came here before us - before Inferno Team, officially recognized as the first organized military insertion into Inferno - and not after, as a support unit.

Why tell us we're the first? And how many others came in before us? Was our "care package" assembled from this camp's supplies, or from __another__ camp?

And what the hell were they doing here?

TEXT LOG 9

I still haven't talked to anyone about the presence haunting my dreams. I'm worried they'll think I'm cracking. Hierarchy will collapse if I can't hold the team's confidence, and any amount of disorder will get somebody killed, like it almost did Olsen. I just wish I could tell if the visions are Inferno's doing, or if I'm going Section 8.

I saw Sophie writhing around inside Borg's bed roll like a snake, licking his face and grinding her haunches against him while she moaned and panted. I was awake when I saw it. I'm not sure how long I watched, but it scared Borg when he woke suddenly and asked me if I needed something.

Sophie was still there, writhing on top of him, when I told him no. He didn't seem to notice.

I'm relieved to find that the others might be having similar dreams. They have sleepless bags under their eyes and I catch them talking about their home lives now - all of a sudden it's a topic of interest for everyone. Olsen's hunting trips in Norway. The bartender Borg's been meaning to propose to for twenty years. Parker's four sisters, for whom she's the mediator and therapist - on earth she gets neurotic phonecalls from them every day, about a minute apart, usually about how one of the other three is interfering with the caller's personal life. Ellison talks about his nephew, who's like a little brother to him. Adams hasn't called her dad in ten years, and they fight whenever she does. Both the kids talk about whatever dumbasses they were banging back home; I'm damned certain those two are fucking like rabbits whenever it's someone else's watch. I know for fact I saw Adams sneak into Ellison's tent last time I relieved her. Don't know what's gotten into them.

I don't talk. I talked a little the last time Parker tried to get me to open up, but I was short with her. She asked if it was something she'd said that had offended me, and started apologizing for getting so cross with me over my decisions as team captain.

"You remind me of someone I'd rather not think about right now," was all I said to her. She seemed to get the message.

Ellison called me off my watch so I could sleep. I'm afraid to close my eyes. What I see when I'm awake is bad enough. I spent my entire shift watching the blood pond at the bottom of the cliff: watching Toni, Wesley, and Zach splashing each other, squealing and giggling. They were all impossibly the same age, and I didn't care. Hell's legions could've marched into our camp and I wouldn't have noticed.

Still no response from earth. IPS is still a glorified paperweight.

TEXT LOG 10

No more berserk shots from now on. I shoulda capped Olsen in the slough and left him.

We've been resting for two days. Every hour Olsen seemed to get worse: he'd stripped off his envirosuit at one point and walked around the camp in undershirt and boxers (damned sure Adams has been fucking his hyperactive ass, too), kept scratching his neck where Doc Parker had given him the shot 'til the skin was raw. Moaned constantly and shook like a junky, whimpering about needing another shot. When he wasn't begging for another shot he was pacing endlessly, or sitting on the edge of the cliff, staring at nothing, panting like a dog.

Whined that his wound was opening again; that he was dying. Parker kept telling him another shot could kill him, and that he was just feeling the withdrawal symptoms. He'd be back to normal in a few days. We all try to be civil and patient with him: they call it "berserk" for a lot of reasons, mostly because it leaves the user with the strength of an ox and the temper of a box of dynamite.

Olsen's already worryingly big, fit, and nutty for an egghead without super-steroids being a factor. Parker says he'll be fine in a couple more days. I can't wait that long.

TEXT LOG 11

Losing my temper with everyone today.

I argued with Sophie about putting her on radio / IPS duty, to try and re-establish contact with earth. She refused her orders and opted instead to argue the futility of it. She insists Sweet Home deliberately cut us off when we found the campsite, but she can't give any logical reason why they wouldn't want it found. Said I should get my head out of the sand. Lost my cool and slapped her, almost bowled her over.

Tired of the bitch challenging my every order. Naysaying and pessimism won't get us off this planet, and it sure as hell won't accomplish the job we came here to do. Focusing on the mission will keep our minds occupied. I feel like I'm the only one who believes this.

Borg's been worried about my neurotic tics, and about how I treated Doc Parker. Said I've had to make a lot of tough decisions in a short time, and offered to take command of the team for awhile so I can get some rest. I don't know if it was the polite suggestion that I be relieved of command, or the memory of him sleeping with my wife the previous day like it was nothing, but I was short with him. Had to have some private conferences to patch things up with my sergeant and my new chief science officer (now that Olsen is a jittery freak who seems to want to kill or fuck anything and everything).

I made it clear to Borg how much I depend on him as my right hand, and my voice of reason. Said that I would continue leading the team for now, but that if it comes to it, there's nobody I'd rather have in charge than him.

Sophie knows I'm sorry for hitting her, but she won't be speaking to me for the rest of the day. Guess I don't blame her.

TEXT LOG 12

Managed to make Parker laugh a little this morning. She's slowly getting talkative again, but she won't tell me what she and Olsen were quietly arguing about earlier. Thought he might've stolen the other berserk shots, because the pack was empty. Parker said she'd put them somewhere safe, where Olsen couldn't get at them.

She didn't make eye contact when she said it.

I understand those two have been part of the same science team at Outpost Two for five years. That makes them bosom nerd buddies, so I wouldn't put it past Parker to dote on him when he's sick.

Went to the mountaintop with the rangefinder and did some terrain scouting. Further north there's a structure just visible through the mist, much larger than Hell Keep. Could be Plutonia Labs. We're going to discuss whether to backtrack for the rest of our supplies, maybe try to Jerry-rig the dead ATRV; or move ahead on foot with what we have.

UPDATE: Olsen energetic again. That Parker bitch is hopeless.

AUDIO LOG 10

[Periodic crunching boots, metallic sounds of firearms being locked and loaded. Parker and Adams talk in the background.]

ADAMS: "-joint's been givin' me hell all day..."

PARKER: "That should reduce the swelling in a few minutes. You'll be fine 'til we meet up again."

ADAMS: "Thanks, Doc."

CHIEF: [aside] "Leave me the BFG and a few cells. That'll be enough to stop anything I meet. You all have your orders, so move out when ready." [to mic] "We're preparing an assault on the northern compound sighted from the mountaintop. The southern skies are calm and clear - or as clear as they're gonna get - so Borg and the kids are backtracking to collect what we need from the rovers. I'm scouting ahead with the docs to get a better look at the compound. We all meet back at the camp in six hours."

BORG: [distant muttering] "-finally get to __shoot__ a heavy weapon this time. The __docs__ will get to shoot the big guns before __I__ do, just you wait 'n see..."

[Rustling and grinding of boots on the ground. A few more muttered words, then footsteps as Ellison and Adams move away, their voices fading as they chatter tenderly. Borg and Chief wish each other luck.]

TEXT LOG 13

Five fucking minutes. That's how long I was away from them.

We'd come to a small mountain range a good long ways from the compound and stopped for a brief rest on the side of the tallest mountain, on account of Olsen's griping (I think he's playing it up, now that he knows Parker will help him). I'd gone up to the mountaintop to use the rangefinder again and check for bogeys in the area. Partly I just didn't want to listen to the junky beg again.

I came back down at Parker's first scream and found a red-faced Olsen pinning her to the dirt, veins bulging out of his neck, trying to tear her out of her envirosuit and threatening to fuck her to death. I guess she'd finally said 'no.'

He was too fast with all that junk in his system: locked his hand around Parker's throat the moment he saw me approach, a split-second before I had my revolver pointed at his face.

I told him to let her go and back away. "I just want a shot," he sort of laughed, like it was all innocent fun.

"I'll give you one right now," I said. "Right between the fuckin' eyes if you don't let her go." I'd stopped about two full paces away from him. I wouldn't miss.

"I'll rip her throat out if you do, Chief. Think about it."

Parker choked out, "Don't you __dare__ kill him! He's not himself! I __told__ you not to give him a full dose!"

"And you been giving him little ones behind my back. But it's still all __my__ fault, isn't that right?"

Parker didn't reply.

Olsen and me stared at each other for a long time, not moving a muscle. His hand tightened on Parker's throat so her voice came out in tiny chirps. "Please don't kill him. He's my friend."

Finally I told him: "Here's how this'll go, Olsen. You have five seconds. If you let her go before five, you have my word as an officer that I won't kill you. Then Slim can give you something to ease your pain a little."

I got to four before he released her. He let her crawl out from under him, still giving me that odd, childish smile.

I planted my boot in his face and sent him rolling down the mountain.

Parker had just stared imminent rape and death in the face. So what did she do? She cursed me for a neanderthal, and then slid down the mountain after her colleague. I walked to the edge and saw her mollycoddling him while he laid in a fetal position, hands over his face, entire body shaking with sobs. He mewled apologies endlessly to no one in particular. Couldn't hear what she was saying to him.

We still had several miles to go before I could scout the compound in person - in the rangefinder it always appeared deserted. I told Parker I was moving on, and she could either tag along with the guy who'd protect her, or take her chances with the wild man. I walked alone for a while, with only her angry curses as company. But a half-hour later I looked back and saw her angrily following my trail, wiping furious tears from her eyes.

"You give him the shot?" I asked when she finally caught up.

"No," she said flatly.

We haven't spoken since.

TEXT LOG 14

Closet. Jade marble closet. No light.

Walls embroidered with skull designs.

No light but for the PDA screen. One wall white metal. Must be the door. No way to open from this side. No knobs or hinges or anything.

Thought I heard Borg shrieking somewhere in the distance, but it couldn't be Borg. Most fearless marine I ever knew. It's beyond him to scream like that.

Fucked up this time. Didn't think they saw me, but I got too close. Goddamned zombie patrol found me. I jumped one and wrestled for his weapon. Tried to be quiet. Clumsy and stupid is all I am. Broke his neck, but by then I was prone with the dead sumbitch on top of me, and six more bastards surrounding me, shouting gibberish at me with their guns in my face. Didn't fight or try to flee or anything. Too dizzy with jungle battles and deafening sounds of screaming, dying squad-mates. I laid there with my hands out, howling like a baby.

Zombie gibberish outside my door. I know the voice.

Ellison talking demon-speak. He'd been screaming, too, before Borg.

They took my guns and dragged me inside, through I don't know how many winding mazes of slime-green corridors and wood-paneled ossuaries overflowing with inhuman skulls, to a room with pulsating flesh-pillars rising out of the ground and walls lined with bloody human remains stuck on pikes. They ttoook sme tto sss

the lord of the house is the devil himself

sneering goat-face and all

his hands burned so hot and they touched my head and squeezed and burned and i just started crying and wailing like an infant. he showed me the labs, crawling with gibbering former humans. they worshiped the flabby thing that lorded over them, that colossal quivering mound of lard, lounging caesar-like on a throne of steel. it flailed and squealed at the workers with short dinosaur talons. then it looked at me and it seemed to smile with its tiny face and i saw the eyes, those goddamned red serpent eyes from my dreams, and its droning laugh rattled the walls of my skull and i woke up in here, in the dark, alone.

gonna die a useless burnout in a tiny cell in some forgotten corner of hell

my kids will never know what happened to daddy

AUDIO LOG 11

[Air is filled with a constant droning, almost like a chant - either the wind howling through the halls or some unnatural presence inside the compound. Every few moments something screeches or howls in the distance. Crackling of wall-torches is faintly noticeable at many points as Chief passes them. Chief and Parker are panting as if from a vigorous run.]

PARKER: "Here!"

CHIEF: "You sure?"

PARKER: "Yes!"

[Their feet clop on marble floor tiles as they swiftly walk. There's a loud screech, and a shout of alarm from Parker. Chief shouts for her to "get the fuck down" - a rough thud, possibly Parker falling down from being shoved - then the rapid zapping of the BFG on pulse mode firing a salvo of energy bolts. The screech weakly fades, and all is silent except for the droning for half a minute.]

CHIEF: [weakly] "Jesus Christ..."

PARKER: "Don't look at them."

CHIEF: "Are they all eggheads? What the fuck have they been __doing__ to them...?"

PARKER: "He's here, Chief. Come see."

[Footsteps on marble for a minute as Chief draws slowly closer to someone weakly wheezing.]

PARKER: "Are you recording?"

CHIEF: "Yes, goddammit!"

PARKER: "Doctor? It's me again."

[The wheezing voice laughs weakly, mumbles something unintelligible.]

CHIEF: [horrified, awestruck] "How's he still alive without his...?"

PARKER: "Tell Chief who you are, for the record."

[Wheezing voice is barely intelligible: laughs and identifies itself as "Ambassador Mohrig."]

PARKER: "You're Dr. Thomas Mohrig?"

MOHRIG: [struggles to speak] "Yes...chief engineer of...Plutonia Labs...UAC space research..."

PARKER: "Let's get you down from there. Chief, help me remove these stakes."

MOHRIG: "Don't...There's no point...She never lets me go..." [laughs] "I'm her nightly reading..."

CHIEF: "Doctor-"

MOHRIG: "P-Punishes me if I resist..." [half-sobs] "'Be good for Mommy or she'll take another piece away...' She'll take my tongue next, for talking to you...My only release is death. She won't kill me, and She Herself can't be killed...She is __everywhere__ these days..."

CHIEF: "We can 'release' you right now, if you tell us where to find Plutonia Labs. Just give us a dir-"

PARKER: "Dr. Mohrig, you were officially declared dead on earth. There was no record of a return trip to Inferno."

[Mohrig laughs weakly, starts coughing.]

PARKER: "Dr. Mohrig, please! How did you get here? How did these other engineers come to Inferno?"

MOHRIG: "How...did __you__ get here?"

PARKER: "We were deployed on a military operation."

MOHRIG: [amused half-laugh, half-cough] "You were __delivered__. Not deployed. First Class, no less..."

PARKER: "I don't unders-"

CHIEF: "Nevermind how __anybody__ got here. How do we get to Plutonia Labs? We were sent for the quantum accelerator."

[Mohrig laughs harder, goes into a wet coughing fit.]

PARKER: "Dr. Mohrig, please explain-!"

CHIEF: [aside] "Sophie, shuddup! It doesn't matter!"

MOHRIG: [chuckles] "For what it's worth, Chief...the 'Lab doesn't matter, either."

CHIEF: "It matters to me. The accelerator is the only reason I'm here."

MOHRIG: [painful laughing as he speaks] " _ _I'm__ the only reason you're here! You __have__ no assignment! You're just one tiny part of __my__ assignment!"

[Mohrig pants, exhausted from trying to speak too much.]

MOHRIG: [dreamily] "Such a fine idea at the time, but ohh, they didn't __tell__ brilliant, trusting Dr. Mohrig about the treaty details...So here I am, basking in my reward for forging the pact, obedient corporate slave that I am..." [laughs weakly] "She shares such petty things in return, like the Conquistadors did the Indians. We're so easily amused by useless cosmic wonders... Such a doomed, stupid little race are we..."

CHIEF: "This is a waste of time."

PARKER: [aghast] "Are...? You're talking about a __trade?__ "

CHIEF: "He's a babbling lunatic and he's useless. Let's go."

MOHRIG: "The 'Labs are somewhere north of here, in the ash dunes...That's where She hoards Her presents like a greedy human child." [coughing] "Two to my temple should do the trick...if you don't mind..."

CHIEF: "I'll do you one, better, Doc."

TEXT LOG 14

It's been a few days since I've had the courage to revisit the pandemonium back at the demon compound.

The gunfire was what woke me. Just a few shots, then silence. Something in the distance howled what might've been Borg again.

Groan of one cell door opening, then another. Heavy, deranged panting getting louder.

My door opened, blinding me for a minute as the light assaulted my eyes. When they adjusted, the blurry silhouette in the doorway morphed into Doc Olsen. His hands and his chin were coated with fresh blood. Whatever he'd killed, he'd eaten it, too. His face was drenched in sweat and his eyes were dilated and glassy - he was high as a kite, liquid rage rushing through his veins from the shot the bitch had left for him.

He gave me that weird smile of his as he recognized me. I smiled back.

I felt the heel of his boot in my face before I blacked out again.

Woke to the stench of blood the second time I came around. Woke up gagging on it. Head swimming from a concussion. Then details flooded me all at once in no particular order.

My cell door was still open. A human heart was sitting in my lap. It wasn't mine. My envirosuit was painted in blood. The bulldog was shoving its way through the cell door and drooling on my boots.

I grabbed its horns when it lunged on me and wrapped my legs around its neck, squeezing my thighs like a vice and straining to steer its snapping bear-trap jaws out of my face. We might've wrestled for an hour. Eventually its thrashing became sluggish, and then stopped altogether.

I shoved it off of me and bounded out of the cell so fast I smashed into the wall across the corridor and tripped over the zombie corpse Olsen had left behind - a gaping bloody chasm in the middle of its chest, its throat yawning wide where the doctor had ripped out his Adam's apple.

He'd been sporting, the cheeky viking: left the zombie's sidearm and spare mags. First thing I did was check that it was loaded, chamber a round, and unload that round into the unconscious bulldog's skull.

I thought only my memory of the compound was an incoherent mess, but the place was actually __built__ that way. Every twisting hallway or staircase led to an ugly green-tiled or wood-paneled room, which connected to several more twisting hallways or staircases, which either led back the way I came or to more rooms with more halls and staircases. And every room had lesser demons lounging or snacking in the shadows. It'd been designed with childhood nightmares in mind: those hideous dreamscapes where every turn is a wrong turn, and the monsters always know where you are, and you can't get away from them because you keep going in circles.

Gunshots again, and panicked screaming. The halls made following them a dizzy nightmare. I met a former human toting a shotgun and squeezed off two shots, nailing him in the forehead. Looted the corpse, but he didn't have any shells on him except however many were in the gun.

After another minute's bumbling in circles, I rounded a corner and nearly caught a shit-imp fireball square in the chest from the opposite end of a dark, green-marble hallway lined with deep alcoves. Three shit-imps were at the far end, popping in and out of view to screech or beat their chests. Halfway up the hallway, Parker was leaning out of one alcove to take potshots at them, missing every time - her hands were trembling uselessly and reducing her shooting to plug-and-pray. The imps were taunting her, not committed to taking her down. That would change once she ran out of ammo: then they would eat her live flesh while she squirmed in burning agony.

Behind her, creeping along her side of the corridor where she couldn't see, was an ACR-toting former human. It was three steps away from putting the barrel to her head and painting the wall with her face.

I swept into the hallway and pumped a wad of buckshot in the zombie's back: it gurgled and pitched forward onto the floor, writhing and snarling in agony. Parker leapt back and screamed again, emptying the rest of her magazine into the zombie's back while I charged down the corridor, screaming like a gorilla and unloading the shotgun at the imp posse (it had five shells, it turned out). First imp went down immediately with its face shredded. Second and third got peppered with shot and tried to flee; they died swallowing two pills each from the sidearm.

Parker was sobbing when I came back, hands to her mouth. She looked at me with tears of guilt streaming down her cheeks.

The former human that lie bleeding at our feet had Private Adams's face - tattoo and all. The green light in the bloody eye sockets was going out.

Doc Parker said two zombies had come to her cell to drag her through the compound, but the imp posse had a snit with them - they must've been hungry. She'd slipped away during their tussle. She'd heard Olsen's animal howls then as he joined the fight, and at that point thinking about the sounds made her convulse.

She'd stumbled across a lot of terrible things while trying to find her way around. Between us we had only two pistols, a dozen rounds, and no medical supplies, but the things she had to show me were too urgent to wait.

She showed me where they'd been planning to take her, and eventually me: a short flight of steps led up to a long, wood-paneled courtyard with a skull altar at the far end. Levitating twenty feet above the middle of the courtyard was a massive monolith of jade marble, a hideous demonic face carved into the side facing the steps. A pentagram-like symbol had been painted around the face in blood. Private Ellison - his eyes glowing from the death head living inside him - stood at the top of the steps on guard duty, clutching my minigun in his arms. He was watching the spectacle in the courtyard, and didn't notice our stealthy approach from the shadows.

Borg stood underneath the monolith, his wrists chained to the two red pedestals on either side of him. He was shuddering violently, spine arched back, teeth gritting in a seizure-grimace, eyes boiling in their sockets and spilling down his cheeks in gory tears. He'd be a zombie in a matter of moments. Behind him towered the goat-faced baron of the compound, eyes to the sky, hands burning with green hellfire, arms raised as if offering my sergeant to some unholy higher power.

I hadn't noticed all the shit-imps cowering reverently along the walls until __after__ I blew my cover: howling a battle cry at the top of my lungs; bounding up the steps and grabbing Ellison before he could turn around; grabbing his weapon and blanketing the courtyard with hot lead while he struggled to push me away. Borg danced a bloody cha-cha all the way to the ground, along with several of the imps I hadn't been paying attention to. The minigun whined empty after only peppering the braying hell baron's mighty chest a bit.

Ellison caught two Imp fireballs for me, right in the chest and shoulders: they burst like firecrackers and singed my arm hair off. My sidearm spat two slugs into Ellison at point blank as Parker dragged me away, screaming for me to run. That damned goat-god was bleeding, but unfazed. All I'd done was piss him off - him and the entire screeching mob of hell-monkeys that was now pouring through the halls after us.

The lard beast was angry too. I could see its tomato eyes glaring at me every time I blinked. I could feel its angry screams inside my skull, while I was already suffering lapses of dizziness from the concussion. Parker had to run alongside me to keep me from tripping over my own feet.

"This way," she kept saying. She wasn't looking for the exit like a sane person would. She said I had to see Dr. Mohrig. I didn't want a doctor. All I wanted was out, and maybe my BFG, if that wasn't too much to ask.

Sometimes prayers are answered in the form of mean-spirited jokes.

We ran through a long, narrow, white-walled, gravel-floored room that served as a checkpoint of some kind: in the middle of the room was a yawning wooden gate with stout guard towers squatting on either side, manned with angry fire-tossing shit-imps that I somehow managed to take down in spite of my dizzy haze.

I fell as we reached the gate. Parker strained to make me stand, begged me to keep moving. She was staring behind me, back the way we came: the screeches and hollers of a dozen shit-imps were getting louder.

We both froze at the new sound: slow, deliberate crunch of boots on the gravel, approaching us from the other side of the gate. I recognized the heavy, animal-like panting. I looked up and steadied my sloshing brain enough to make out Doc Olsen's curious smile twelve feet away, and the purring BFG 9000 pointing right at my head.

"Found your toy, Chief," he said with a tiny laugh, shaking the BFG in his hands.

"Thanks, Doc," I said, not moving. "I'll take it from here. Company of shit-imps right on our asses."

"I know. I can hear them." He clenched his teeth when he spoke, and his smile got mean. "I heard the ones that found me where you left me, too. They dragged me all over that mountain before I was able to take that last dose and defend myself." A giggle. "Imp tastes like overcooked duck, if you were wondering."

Nobody moved. Beyond the gate, light from outside was visible, pouring in from 'round the left corner: I noticed the shadow that suddenly blotted it out in my peripheral vision, but I kept my eyes focused on the BFG.

"Joss," said Parker.

"Yes, Michelle?" He was smiling politely at her now.

Parker swallowed and spoke louder than necessary. She saw the shadow too, and whatever the source was, it was coming around the corner. "Doctor, we all want to get out of here in one piece! Please put the weapon down!"

"We're not getting out of here," Olsen said. He started huffing more heavily as his blood pressure rose. "We were abandoned here, and we have to make the best of it! Acting civilized won't help us survive here. We have to become like the animals around us, just like in the woods. Survival of the fittest. You already know that, or you wouldn't have left me behind."

"Mission comes first," I said, trying to stand and failing. Playing up my weakness. Olsen relished it. Didn't notice the hell baron's hooves tapping on the gravel behind him - the imps were closer now and drowning it out with their screeching.

"Please," said Parker. "They're coming! Animals or not, we'll have a better chance of survival if we work __together!__ "

"What do I need you for?" he laughed, nodding to me. "He's been wanting to get rid of me since the slough."

He trained the barrel on Parker next, and she jumped. "And you're a common rat who'll do or say whatever gets you out of trouble. You're with him, now, not me. And I don't need anyone's help to survive the wilderness."

"So what're you waiting for?" I said. "Vaporize us already, if you're gonna do it."

His eyes moved erratically to the hall behind us, then back to me. "Thought I might leave you to them for a bit first."

"Do it now," I said, trying to stand again; the goat-god was three steps behind him and moving faster, its hands starting to light up the room with their glow. "But back up a few paces and make sure the blast kills me first. 'Cos if I don't go right away, I'll damn sure kill you myself!"

Olsen was looking at Parker, his smile gone. She'd given it away with her eyes before the devil's soul-nauseating presence flooded the room.

The crazy viking squeezed the trigger as he whirled around, meeting the charging goat-god face-to-face. It grabbed the weapon with one claw and forced it upward, where it discharged into the ceiling and rained cobblestone, ash, and chunks of hell-brick down onto our heads. The baron brayed long and loud and buried its other claw into Olsen's abdomen, spilling his intestines with a flick of its wrist. At the same time Olsen was howling like a beast, himself: he dropped the BFG and buried his fingers into the monster's throat.

I leapt onto the BFG while they danced a snarling tango back and forth, painting the walls and the gravel with gouts of deep red. I turned the barrel on the hallway behind us just as the shit-imp mob came flooding out. Every one of them flew apart in crumbling hunks of charcoal as they ran toward us, nearly smothering us with the harsh smell of burnt flesh and ozone. I spun around and sent another shot through the gate as a second mob of demons started trickling through, trying to flank us. The tentacled plasma ball bowled right through them and stained the walls red with their vaporized entrails. Parker made sure to scramble behind me each time the beast hummed in my arms.

Now only echoes remained of all the screeching and snarling. To my left, the hell baron stood wobbling against the wall, its skin a sickly pink, one burning hand to its bleeding throat. The doc was sitting on his knees at its hooves, his entrails in his lap, the goat-god's esophagus in his right hand. His left arm was gone. He was staring dumbly at the floor, wheezing wetly as the junk flooded out of his system with everything else.

The hell baron fixed its glowing eyes on me and took an awkward step forward, gurgling furiously. The BFG hummed again and reduced both monsters to an ash silhouette on the wall.

The beasties avoided us for the most part after that, those few who were left. We scavenged any supplies we could (more BFG cells and our lost food most importantly). The stragglers who tried to start trouble with us were quick to leave Inferno in a cloud of ash.

We talked with Dr. Mohrig, or what was left of him. They'd cut so many pieces off it's a miracle Parker could recognize him, and staked him to a pillar in a blood-drenched room full of pillars - each of which had its own maimed, twitching human engineer racked up on it. I think there must've been at least thirty. Mohrig was the only one who could talk, and he babbled a lot of nonsense. Did give us one useful bit of intel, though: we know where Plutonia Labs is, and the quantum accelerator. That's our next stop.

The eyes assaulted my mind when I vaporized Mohrig and the rest of the butchered engineers. They were furious. They twisted my guts until I ran out of things to puke up. They flooded my aching head with violent fantasies about my children. I can't write about it.

I won't.

When it finally stopped I was sitting on my ass, sobbing. That was hours ago. We're far, far away from that terrible place now, and not missing it one bit. Sophie treated my head and now I can think straight again, for the most part.

She won't stop arguing or crying about every little thing. How many times has she tripped me up already? Invades my thoughts every minute of the day, won't tell me who she's sleeping with while I'm away, and that's not enough for her. Has to badger me about my every decision, like anyone else who's never had to lead a fucking company in a time of war.

AUDIO LOG 12

[Gentle wind from a mountaintop. The usual howls are more distant than before.]

CHIEF: "Mission log up-"

PARKER: "-have done something."

CHIEF: [long, tired sigh] "What do you want, Slim? An impromptu funeral service? Some of 'em don't have anything left to __bury!__ "

PARKER: "We laid waste to that horrible place! We could've taken the time to do __something!__ They were our __friends__ , for Christ's sake!"

CHIEF: [shouting, furious] "Whaddaya think, they're __dogs__ to me? You think I don't want 'em commemorated for what they went through? You think I __wanted__ Olsen dead?"

PARKER: "I __know__ you wanted him dead! 'I'll cap him in the head and leave him here,' remember? All because he was slowing us down!"

CHIEF: "He was crazy, Slim. If it hadn't been him, it'd have been us."

PARKER: [sobs] "I had thanksgiving dinner at his __house!__ " [sobs] "He was my __friend,__ you __callous piece of shit!__ "

[Brief silence except for the wind and Parker's sobs.]

CHIEF: "We are in a __war zone__. We don't have __time__ for funerals. We worry about that shit when we get back __home__."

PARKER: [disgusted, unintelligible]

CHIEF: "The sooner we finish our mission, the sooner we get home. Worry about funerals once we're back on earth."

PARKER: [screaming] "We're not __going__ back to earth! We're the UAC's __currency!__ "

CHIEF: "I've had my fill o' your whining, you little slut! When we take the 'Labs we'll contact Sweet Home from there, and tell 'em we got the accelerator!"

PARKER: "They don't __want__ the accelerator! They want whatever the demons are giving them in exchange for our __lives!__ "

CHIEF: "Typical Corps bullshit: gotta do everything ourselves, 'cos nobody ever has our backs!"

PARKER: "Will you __listen to me?__ You're walking us into a __deathtrap!__ "

CHIEF: "I'm __taking us home!__ "

PARKER: "I'm __sorry__ you miss your family, I __really__ am, but you've got your head buried so deep in the sand that I refuse to be a part of any-!"

[Violent scraping of boots on soil and rock. Parker shrieks something unintelligible - cut off by a single gunshot. More scraping, a heavy slump. Trickling and spattering on the rocks for a full minute like from a broken watermelon, slowly dying into a near-imperceptible drip. Chief sniffs, takes several deep, shaky breaths and says nothing for another minute.]

CHIEF: [speaks slowly, absentmindedly] "Plutonia Labs not visible with the viewfinder yet. Will know the ETA once it's in sight."

TEXT LOG 15

First good night's sleep since this operation began. Head's clear of all distractions.

I buried the last of them in the desert.

AUDIO LOG 13

[Opens in mid-conversation, with low howl of desert wind in the background. After comparison with Phobos Incident audio logs, Chief's conversation partner identified as "Sarge," the author of the Phobos Incident file.]

SARGE: [speaks in a hollow, weary voice] "-see the eyes, too, whenever I'm in its territory. It's sorta like when an airbase picks up unidentified aircraft on radar and warns the pilot to fuck off. You get used to it after awhile."

CHIEF: "So we assassinate this thing, and then what?"

SARGE: "The Mastermind uses telepathy to invade your mind. It does the same with every living thing under its control, using it as a sort of radio frequency for commanding its troops. No more Mastermind, no more orders. Legion falls into disarray, wrecks any plans it has for an organized earth invasion. Makes the rest easy pickings for earth forces, assuming the demons don't just lose interest and start fighting each other."

[A few moments of tense silence as the two men eat from their rations.]

CHIEF: "Why didn't you meet up with us all this time? We got your care packages, but we coulda used your __help__."

SARGE: [grunts, chews in silence for awhile] "Tried that with the other teams. I became good buddies with the first team, 'til I figured out they were sacrificial gifts to the Mastermind. They couldn't believe they weren't going home: they were so deep in denial that eventually I had guns pointing at my head when I tried to convince them. One marine was an ordained minister. He got them believing I was a demon sent to lead them astray."

[Silent chewing for a moment, then Sarge swallows.]

SARGE: "He hunted me halfway across the planet before I finally had to kill him...The teams after that were either no different, or already dead when I found 'em."

CHIEF: "They were all...All of 'em sacrificial lambs, like us?"

SARGE: [mutters affirmative] "Like you, Dr. Mohrig, the quantum accelerator, and everyone at Plutonia Labs HQ. They're probably already gearing up a new team to flush down this cosmic toilet. I'm sorry it took so long to approach you. Hoped more of you woulda made it out of that fortress."

CHIEF: "It doesn't make sense."

SARGE: "Makes perfect sense. UAC finds out there's a world fulla hellspawn that want our slipgate tech, and are willing to invade and conquer to get it. CEOs think with their bank accounts, figuring they can trade their technology and workers in exchange for unearthly assets that they could market for big bucks. A monopoly on supernatural consumer goods. Maybe they figure it'll convince 'em not to invade, or only invade areas the UAC wants invaded. Whatever reason they got for doing it, they're too profit-minded to consider what a terrible idea it is to give teleporters and spaceships and advanced weaponry to a prison full of monsters...monsters which were probably exiled here from somewhere else and looking to jump bail."

CHIEF: "Like what, the Australia of the cosmos?"

SARGE: "Just my bullshit theory. They're damned anxious to go somewhere else, that's all I know. And the Mastermind is building an army. Building new weapons and testing them on rival hellspawn, taking over their territories. It rules half the globe, last I checked."

CHIEF: "Everyone thinks you're dead."

SARGE: "UAC already knows better. Another reason I kept my distance. I didn't know you weren't sent here to cap my ass." [bitter laugh] "That's what the __third__ group came for. Enjoyed playing __Chato's Land__ with 'em. Maybe a little too much..."

CHIEF: "You still gave us a share of your supplies."

SARGE: [gulping from water bottle] "I'm a good neighbor."

CHIEF: "Blows my mind that you'd never go home."

SARGE: "Did go home once. Not long."

CHIEF: "Yeah, but...why __stay__ here? I mean... _ _why?__ "

[Sarge chews for a minute, listening to the wind.]

SARGE: "Tired of starting my life over. I started over when I joined the Corps. I started over when I got shipped to Mars. I started over when I decided to come here."

[Clink of a ration can being tossed onto a trash pile; Sarge chews and swallows.]

SARGE: "It's scary starting your life over, 'cos you're wiping the slate clean. Nothing's familiar at first. Sometimes it never is. This place is Hell, but it's familiar. And I have a __purpose__ here. Went through my life on earth wondering why the hell I was alive."

[The snap and slide of a pistol chambering its first round, the the click of the safety.]

SARGE: "Important to have a purpose in life."

CHIEF: [after a pause] "I don't think I could do it. Live here. Not without losing my marbles."

SARGE: "Never become a full resident. Keep your humanity on speed dial. Start to act too much like these animals and you become one, yourself. No going back from that. Seen it happen."

CHIEF: "Yeah...me, too."

[Hiss of an electric furnace powering off. Rustling as the two men stand and gear up.]

CHIEF: "Let's go kill this bitch. I got three beautiful babies waiting for me back home. You got anybody?"

SARGE: "Everyone I cared about is buried on one planet or another. You must love 'em a lot to go through all this for 'em."

CHIEF: "There isn't a thing in this universe I wouldn't do or kill for my children, Sarge."

SARGE: [humorless laugh] "Yeah...I bet."

[Recorder runs a few moments longer before Chief finally shuts it off.]

TEXT LOG 16

The Doomed Marine has been keeping Inferno Team in his peripheral since our first day, when he wasn't busy doing his own thing. After all this time, with all my allies dead and gone, he finally approached me while I was trekking across the desert. We talked awhile, shared rations, shared stories of war in Hell. He knows how to get back to earth, and offered to share that with me...if I do a favor for him.

He knows what I did to Parker. He hasn't said so, but he knows. It's in the things he says sometimes, and the way he says them. Like he's testing my reactions. Looking for signs of guilt.

He won't find any. She gave up. I did her a favor like I did Olsen and Borg a favor. I don't give up. Not to hellspawn legions, not to nosy-ass Hell Marines.

His story is full of holes. How could __one__ flabby red-eyed monster be powerful enough to magically control __every demon in the world__ with its __mind?__ And that conspiracy theory sure sounds familiar, doesn't it? Same senseless bullshit the idiot doctors were trying to feed me. The guy stalked us from the moment of deployment: he's got stockpiles of supplies and gizmos all over Inferno, so who's to say he doesn't have a long-range mic? Who's to say he couldn't have heard my every conversation? It makes no sense! How could earth be cutting deals with the hellspawn __and__ fighting them at the same time?

Whatever he wants in Plutonia Labs, he needs my help getting it. Who knows what the hell they've been developing in those labs. I figure it won't hurt to play along until I figure it out, and make a judgment call when the time comes. For the moment, we need each other. I pretended to believe everything the shifty motherfucker said. Dunno when (or __if__ ) he'll make good on his end of the bargain, but at least I can use him to do what I came here to do at long last.

I miss the smell of grass and the sounds of birds. The cool kiss of a breeze. Blue sky. Trivial shit earth people never pay attention to. Soon as I get back I'm savoring all of it, and I'll savor it with my little babies. Not alone, and not from a cell.

Everyone on earth who knows he exists, thinks he's dead anyway.

TEXT LOG 17

Sitting tight for the moment with pre-op butterflies.

Plutonia Labs sits on the edge of a brick-red canyon in the middle of the dunes. Viewfinder showed the entire facility was intact - even the asphalt of the parking lot and warehouse sector driveways - and protected from the sky by an ever-circling cloud of grinning red floaters. We approached the facility from the bottom of the canyon, where the exposed basement levels stick out of the rocky canyon wall like the guts of a slaughtered animal. The floaters can't see us in the shadows when we hug the facility's side of the canyon.

The 'Marine did a few recon missions a week ago and mapped out the interior: the cargo elevator visits every floor of the basement levels several times a day. Dunno what those zombies are doing in there, but I can see them scurrying around like bees in a hive.

Elevator's coming down to our level. Showtime in sixty seconds.

TEXT LOG 18

He fought damn well. We went over each scene so many times that the real thing was almost a dull routine. Hell Patrol never knew what hit them: we swept into the bottom basement level and tapped every former human twice in the head with our ACRs. Twenty casualties for the demons just on the way to the elevator. It was big enough to fit one of the rovers in, minigun turret and all.

We reloaded on the way up to the main lab. I had the BFG on my back, and the 'Marine was toting all the spare ACR mags and my sentry gun. When we planned it he'd said that I had earned the honor of doing the dirty deed. Seems strange, since he's been fighting the damn thing longer than me, but I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't excite me a little.

The elevator door rattled open on a dull white corridor just as two zombie engineers scurried by. 'Marine tapped them in the heads while I hit the 'stop' switch to freeze the elevator.

Left down the corridor, then right, straight ahead to the first three-way intersection - gunning down a pair of shotgun zombies as they rounded the far end of the hall - then left again to the pneumatic double-doors. They were sealed, and behind their small glass windows the lab flashed and flickered. It was a riot of demon-speak in there, and now and again the skull-rattling voice of the Mastermind shook the doors in their frames - it spoke in a horrible mix of audible and mental drones and screeches. From behind all the noise came the low bass hum of the quantum accelerator warming up for another test.

I handed 'Marine my ACR and primed the BFG for overdrive on human-sized targets; 'Marine slung my rifle over his shoulder and erected the sentry gun to guard the direction the shotgunners had come from, while he took a defensive position facing the way we'd come. The demons infesting the lab couldn't hear our shots earlier, but the hallways were already starting to fill with footsteps and gibbering voices.

I took a deep breath and stepped through the lab doors.

The 'Marine had seen it all before, during his recon - before he'd had the equipment he needed, which I supplied him with - and so had I, when the hell baron showed it to me in the demon compound. The lab was octagonal and as wide as a house. There was a staircase in each of the furthest corners, each one winding up to the catwalks skirting the walls fifteen feet overhead. The walls were khaki metal panels, many of those panels missing or lain to the side to let the electrical guts of the lab hang out obscenely. The catwalks had computer consoles glowing on every wall; the main floor had back-to-back supercomputers set up along its walls every ten feet, and a protective partition in the far back where the accelerator operators would stand during operation.

In the middle of the main floor was the stout, circular quantum accelerator stage: as awesome as the UAC had made it out to be, the gizmo itself was just a humming, spinning gyroscope, its largest ring about as wide as a kiddie pool and glowing with soft white light.

I wish he'd warned me about the stink: stale sweat and other bodily odors, burnt rubber, rotten meat and old blood. Every level of the lab was cluttered with discarded papers, dangling wires, carelessly dropped tools and trash, and the ancient, bloody remains of UAC security personnel the demons hadn't bothered eating or removing. The catwalks and main floor were crawling with green-eyed, gibberish-babbling former humans in engineer jumpsuits. They scurried like cockroaches as they obeyed whatever incoherent commands their insane leader was shrieking at them.

The bloated lard-beast from my vision was there, commanding the zombies from the ceiling thirty feet overhead. She'd had cosmetic surgery since I saw her flabby ass last, and modified herself with six home-made cybernetic spider-legs, their robotic veins and tendons visible at every oily, rubber-rimmed joint. She squatted up there like a gorged tarantula, not bothering to move a muscle as she screeched and droned. Her size made my heart leap into my throat: legs and all, she was as big as a monster truck.

I'd already squeezed the trigger when I stepped through the lab doors, and took in most of these details just before the first shot went off and wiped out the left half of the laboratory. Every lightning tendril had a target: zombie engineers howled and flailed as they blackened and disintegrated. Mainframes and consoles cracked and erupted in white flashes of fire from within before they melted in on themselves.

Mastermind was shrieking in fury. I barely heard the sentry gun as it barked at the next team of zombies that rounded the corner. I heard 'Marine's ACR chattering at a second team coming from the other direction.

I squeezed off another shot and leveled the right half of the lab. A handful of engineers escaped the weapon's wrath only to be set on fire by the mainframes as they burst like giant cherry bombs. The lab shook in its foundation and the right catwalk warped and collapsed, crushing two more former humans into a bloody pulp. I was already coughing my lungs out from the stench of charred flesh and ozone.

The 'Marine's barrage was hammering on my eardrums now, so I barely heard the scuttle-stomping overhead. I squeezed the trigger again before I turned the barrel upward and stared directly into the furious, fist-sized, blood-red eyes that'd terrorized my sleep from the beginning, her sneering piranha-mouth close enough to kiss me on the forehead. Her brand new front legs were rearing back to pulp me where I stood when the BFG went off in her face.

It took less than a second for that little green nova to peel her like an onion. Skin and muscle boiled and tore away; skull eroded to dust from the center out; brain jellied and boiled into noxious vapor. Best of all those hideous red snake-eyes blackened, shriveled, and burnt away like tomatoes under a blowtorch. I felt her psychic shriek of agony disintegrate with the rest of her. Then I puked, taking in one too many lungfuls of the bitch's aerosolized corpse.

The assault had lasted no more than eleven seconds. I took one last look at the accelerator, spat, and erased it with the last of my power cells. Mission accomplished. Col. Warren can kiss my ass.

Weren't many former humans left after that massacre. Only one security squad was left, and we tricked them into shooting __each other__ in the cubicle offices! 'Marine insists there's nothing in the 'Labs that interests him: what he wants is to level the place and tip it into the canyon, so it can never be used again. He stationed me on the surface level of the facility with my pet sentry gun, with "orders" to watch-dog the front entrance from the circular command center.

The 'Marine had two army satchels filled with semtex charges - I don't know if he made them himself or got them off one of the other teams. We did a radio check so we could chatter occasionally from across the facility while he ran his little bomb errands on each of the basement levels.

"I gotta rig charges in some security-heavy areas," he'd said before we separated. "I took all the security systems offline, but I left the cameras running so you can see I'm not abandoning you." Here he pointed to the camera monitors lining the back wall.

"Never figured you would," I said, smiling.

That humorless laugh of his again. "Also locked down the north and east entrances. Only way in here now is the front door and the elevator. Keep me updated on anything you see up here that looks like trouble. And don't touch any of the consoles while I'm downstairs."

He nodded to one console on the north wall, which featured an especially large black switch set in a deep red panel. "That'll lock down all the quarantine doors. We'll close them after all the charges are set, in case something wanders in and tries to follow us back to the canyon." He looked at me. " _ _After__ , and not before. I gotta set charges in the restricted labs where they don't have air ducts. Understand?"

I told him I wasn't a toddler, and I wouldn't touch anything. He was out of the control room and headed down the elevator shaft before I could ask about his end of the bargain.

We chatter now and then while he works, about trivial shit. We talked about our families back on earth (what little family he had is dead now), and how we joined the Corps in the first place. He eventually got around to sharing his big secret for getting back to earth, and it sounds too simple to be true.

He watches his PDA internet connection. That's it. When he connects, that means there's a slipgate somewhere in Inferno - the strength of the signal tells him roughly how far away, and he climbs to higher ground and uses the rangefinder - which I currently possess - to locate the portal. After all the tech issues Sweet Home put us through, it actually makes sense.

I admit I actually thought twice about killing him. If only he hadn't started asking about my former teammates: who they were, what they were like, what experience they had with hellspawn that landed them on the party list.

He's on his way down to the restricted labs now, asking about the doctors. I'm sitting next to the big red switch, watching the monitors in those areas. I can see the frames of the quarantine doors at the hall junctions. Figure I'll wait 'til he's busy setting the charges to seal him in and smother him.

At least this way I don't gotta dirty my hands. Still turns my stomach to do it to a fellow marine, but he'll have me caged up by his next earth contact if I don't do it to him, first.

Twelve years away from my nest is long enough.

TEXT LOG 19

I gave him a chance.

He was a good, tough marine, but he was exhausted when I met him. He tried to keep his eye on me when we camped together that night. He was asleep the moment his head went down, and he stayed asleep for twelve hours or more. Didn't miss his PDA when I swiped it and stole a look at his mission logs. I knew I'd seen two come out of that demon compound. Never asked him what happened to his partner.

I thought about killing him right there, while he slept. I didn't for a lot of reasons. I needed his help. I had reasonable doubt that maybe he wasn't a monster after all. I don't know if I'd have turned his ass in as soon as I was back on earth; don't even have plans to __go__ back. I had a tiny glint of hope that maybe his conscience would come around, and that his desperation hadn't erased all traces of it.

So I kept a few things from him, as a test of character. Deal with enough untrustworthy humans in Hell and you develop a knack for forcing their hand.

I told him the Mastermind controlled the floaters and forced them to work as guard dogs, and that they'd disperse when she was dead. Which was all true.

I didn't tell him that the bitch has been cloning herself, to spread her consciousness across Inferno during her campaign: stationing the greater clones at sites of military importance, and putting the smaller, weaker "baby" clones in charge of battalions. I didn't tell him I'd already assassinated three of the greater clones to date, or that each one used clouds of floaters as living security systems. I didn't tell him how hungry the floaters were upon release, and that they'd immediately start eating each other, and any living thing they saw on the ground below them.

And I didn't tell him that the control room had a retractable canopy for a roof, for making long-distance satellite calls; nor that the canopy switch was very clearly labeled on the console before I tore off the label and called it a "quarantine" lock.

Several floors above me I could hear the heavy groan of the canopy, and imagined it slowly yawning beneath a gory thunderstorm of frenzied floater-demons. I heard the sentry gun emptying its magazine over the course of a full minute, and an ACR firing wildly on full auto for about three seconds. Then it was quiet, for the most part.

I gave him a chance to take the high road. He failed the test.

Got the charges set in under an hour, going from the upper floors to the lowest basement level. Wasted no time putting as much distance between me and the 'Labs as I could before blowing it further into hell. Was a hell of a sight, watching that giant concrete spark plug tearing itself out of the canyon wall, twisting as it doubled over and came crashing down to the bottom of the canyon in an avalanche of rock, steel, and fire.

I came back a week later, when the last of the floaters had gone, to sift through the debris and hopefully salvage Inferno Team's BFG 9000. Haven't found it yet, so I'm sitting on a heap of scrap metal at the bottom of the canyon as I write, enjoying a cool breeze and a light lunch. Luck is a funny thing, however: Chief is here in the form of a cracked PDA and a few traces of his sentry gun. Maybe his voyage into Inferno won't have been such a waste after all.

I don't know what you'll tell Chief's kids, whoever you are. I guess you can tell them that he fought for them - and them alone - for twelve long, hard years. Try not to blame your dad for what he became. If anyone, blame the UAC.

The Mastermind still has plenty of spare bodies lurking in Hell's darkest corners, so I still have a job to do. I won't email this mission log at the next slipgate - first UAC pencil-pusher who finds it will likely delete it. Best thing to do is leave this someplace where the next herd of sacrificial lambs can find it. Maybe now they'll listen, and warn the rest of the planet about the UAC's treachery, and the severity of the demonic threat. Then again, maybe I'm a naive sap.

Expect to hear from me again sometime, Earth. "Doomed Marine" out.

###

 _ _The folly of this document has become clear to me, as I look out my apartment window at the burning pandemonium that was once my neighborhood. I can barely see the streets through all the smoke, and what little I can see is as indescribable as the ungodly sounds - those of civilization collapsing on itself. The news stations show the same: skyscrapers burn like giant torches, the sky is overcast with smoke and ash, people run and scream in the streets as their wildest nightmares burn them with hellfire. My neighbors are screaming in the hall outside even as I write this, and something otherworldly is screaming with them.__

 _ _I assembled this document to protect myself against the UAC and its agents. It was all for naught, as the UAC will now collapse along with everything else - they'll be the first course at the Banquet of Hell.__

 _ _Humanity has an incredible ability to adapt and overcome. Maybe whoever overcomes this "hell on earth" will find this document someday, and perhaps learn from it.__

 _ _God help us all.__

 _ _\- D. Carver__

 _ _###__


End file.
